As I work a lot with Large Language Models (LLMs), I often have to deal with flaky test cases, because LLMs are not always consistent and deterministic in their responses. Thus, sometimes, a test passes maybe a few times in a row, but then, once in a while, it fails. Maybe some prompt tweaks will make the test pass more consistently, lowering the temperature too, or using techniques like few-shot prompting will help the model better understand what it has to do. Read more...

In this article, we’ll explore another great task where Large Language Models shine: entity and data extraction. LLMs are really useful beyond just mere chatbots (even smart ones using Retrieval Augmented Generation). Let me tell you a little story of a handy application we could build, for wannabe Instagram influencers! Great Instagram hashtags, thanks to LLMs When posting Instagram pictures, I often struggle with finding the right hashtags to engage with the community. Read more...

In a rencent article, we talked about text classification using Gemini and LangChain4j. A typical example of text classification is the case of sentiment analysis. In my LangChain4j-powered Gemini workshop, I used this use case to illustrate the classification problem: ChatLanguageModel model = VertexAiGeminiChatModel.builder() .project(System.getenv("PROJECT_ID")) .location(System.getenv("LOCATION")) .modelName("gemini-1.5-flash-001") .maxOutputTokens(10) .maxRetries(3) .build(); PromptTemplate promptTemplate = PromptTemplate.from(""" Analyze the sentiment of the text below. Respond only with one word to describe the sentiment. INPUT: This is fantastic news! Read more...

Certain models like Gemini are multimodal. This means that they accept more than just text as input. Some models support text and images, but Gemini goes further and also supports audio, video, and PDF files. So you can mix and match text prompts and different multimedia files or PDF documents. Until LangChain4j 0.32, the models could only support text and images, but since my PR got merged into the newly released 0. Read more...

Generative AI has potential applications far beyond chatbots and Retrieval Augmented Generation. For example, a nice use case is: text classification. I had the chance of meeting some customers and prospects who had the need for triaging incoming requests, or for labeling existing data. In the first case, a government entity was tasked with routing citizen requests to access undisclosed information to the right governmental service that could grant or reject that access. Read more...

LangChain4j 0.32.0 was released yesterday, including my pull request with the support for lots of new Gemini features: JSON output mode, to force Gemini to reply using JSON, without any markup, JSON schema, to control and constrain the JSON output to comply with a schema, Response grounding with Google Search web results and with private data in Vertex AI datastores, Easier debugging, thanks to new builder methods to log requests and responses, Function calling mode (none, automatic, or a subset of functions), Safety settings to catch harmful prompts and responses. Read more...

A few months ago, I shared an article about what I called Java functional builders, inspired by an equivalent pattern found in Go. The main idea was to have builders that looked like this example: LanguageModel languageModel = new LanguageModel( name("cool-model"), project("my-project"), temperature(0.5), description("This is a generative model") ); Compared to the more tranditional builder approach: You’re using the new keyword again to construct instances. There’s no more build() method, which felt a bit verbose. Read more...

The happy users of Gemini Advanced, the powerful AI web assistant powered by the Gemini model, can execute some Python code, thanks to a built-in Python interpreter. So, for math, logic, calculation questions, the assistant can let Gemini invent a Python script, and execute it, to let users get a more accurate answer to their queries. But wearing my Apache Groovy hat on, I wondered if I could get Gemini to invoke some Groovy scripts as well, for advanced math questions! Read more...

The latest release of LangChain4j (version 0.31) added the capability of grounding large language models with results from web searches. There’s an integration with Google Custom Search Engine, and also Tavily. The fact of grounding an LLM’s response with the results from a search engine allows the LLM to find relevant information about the query from web searches, which will likely include up-to-date information that the model won’t have seen during its training, past its cut-off date when the training ended. Read more...

As a follow-up to my talk on generative AI for Java developers, I’ve developed a new presentation that focuses more on the Gemini large multimodal model by Google. In this talk, we cover the multimodality capabilities of the model, as it’s able to ingest code, PDF, audio, video, and is able to reason about them. Another specificity of Gemini is its huge context window of up to 1 million tokens! This opens interesting perspectives, especially in multimodal scenarios. Read more...