LangChain provides many modules that can be used to build language model applications. Modules can be combined to create more complex applications, or be used individually for simple applications.
LLMs: Get predictions from a language model#
The most basic building block of LangChain is calling an LLM on some input.
Let’s walk through a simple example of how to do this.
For this purpose, let’s pretend we are building a service that generates a company name based on what the company makes.
In order to do this, we first need to import the LLM wrapper.
from langchain.llms import OpenAI
We can then initialize the wrapper with any arguments.
In this example, we probably want the outputs to be MORE random, so we’ll initialize it with a HIGH temperature.
llm = OpenAI(temperature=0.9)
We can now call it on some input!
text = "What would be a good company name for a company that makes colorful socks?"
print(llm(text))
Feetful of Fun
For more details on how to use LLMs within LangChain, see the LLM getting started guide.
Prompt Templates: Manage prompts for LLMs#
Calling an LLM is a great first step, but it’s just the beginning.
Normally when you use an LLM in an application, you are not sending user input directly to the LLM.
Instead, you are probably taking user input and constructing a prompt, and then sending that to the LLM.
For example, in the previous example, the text we passed in was hardcoded to ask for a name for a company that made colorful socks.
In this imaginary service, what we would want to do is take only the user input describing what the company does, and then format the prompt with that information.
This is easy to do with LangChain!
First lets define the prompt template:
rtdocs_stable/api.python.langchain.com/en/stable/getting_started/getting_started.html