Can LLMs Learn? Let’s Customize an LLM to Chat With Your Own Data

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Feeling the limitations of LLMs? They can be creative, but sometimes lack accuracy or rely on outdated information. In this workshop, we’ll break down the process of building and easily deploying a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system. This approach enables you to leverage the power of LLMs with the added benefit of factual accuracy and up-to-date information.

This workshop has been presented at C3 Dev Festival 2024, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.

FAQ

Andrea suggests using a self-hosted model like Lama if you are concerned about privacy, ensuring that your data never leaves your control. Alternatively, you can use public models for non-sensitive proprietary data.

The workshop demonstrates creating a speaker recommendation application that retrieves information about speakers and talks from the C3 Festival website based on user interests, using Node.js, React, and OpenAI.

The technology stack for the speaker recommendation application includes Node.js, React, and TypeScript. The backend service communicates with an OpenAI model, and the application is deployed using Genesio, a serverless platform.

The brute force approach involves putting all proprietary data into the prompt itself before asking a question. However, this can be inefficient, expensive, and may exceed the maximum prompt length of the model.

You can set up an LLM to chat with your own data by using a method called retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which involves storing your proprietary data in a specialized storage and retrieving relevant context to provide to the model along with your question.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is an approach where proprietary data is stored in a specialized storage, and based on a user's question, relevant data is retrieved and provided to the LLM to generate an accurate response.

Andrea believes that LLMs save a lot of time with tasks like debugging and writing code, allowing software engineers to focus more on learning, designing architectures, and thinking about products.

Fine-tuning an LLM with proprietary data is expensive, requires machine learning expertise, and a large amount of data. It may not be effective if the proprietary data is not substantial enough to make a difference in the model.

Andrea is a software engineer working at Genesio who is passionate about LLMs and generative AI.

The workshop focuses on how to integrate LLMs, OpenAI, and AI models into your own applications, with a specific use case of creating a speaker recommendation application.

Andreia Ocanoaia
Andreia Ocanoaia
48 min
12 Jun, 2024

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Video Summary and Transcription
Today's workshop introduced the concept of LLMs and their potential to free up time for software engineers. It discussed setting up LLMs to chat with proprietary data, utilizing retrieval augmented generation for small chats, and building a speaker recommendation application using this approach. The workshop also addressed concerns about running data on OpenAI and explored the process of splitting and storing data in a vector database. It concluded with the deployment of an end-to-end application using Genesio and invited attendees to provide feedback and stay in touch.

1. Introduction to LLMs and Generative AI

Short description:

Today we are going to talk about LLMs and how they can free up time for software engineers to focus on product development and robust architectures.

Well, hello, everyone. So I'm Andrea. I'm working at Genesio and I'm so happy to be here and I'm hyped to talk about LLMs and generative AI because it's a pretty interesting subject right now.

Today we are going to talk about LLMs and I am pretty sure that you are also hyped about the topic because you are here at the workshop where you can actually learn how to integrate LLMs, OpenAI, and AI models in general into your own applications.

So I am actually pretty passionate about this subject because OpenAI is actually giving us, and LLMs in general, are actually giving us the gift of time. So I'm going to be honest, I have a few dozen conversations with ChatGPT right now and it fairly saved me a lot of time with debugging and writing code. And now I can actually focus more on learning, on designing architectures, on stuff that ChatGPT cannot do but I can do and I have more time to do it. So actually I'm pretty hyped about this topic because I want to see LLMs and AI models more embedded into our work as software engineers so we can actually free our time to think about products and to think about robust architectures and so on.

2. Setting up LLMs to Chat with Proprietary Data

Short description:

Today I will show you how to set up an LLM, such as OpenAI, to chat with your own data. One challenge is that if you have proprietary data, the model won't know how to respond. To overcome this, we can provide the proprietary data and context to the model. There are different approaches, including fine-tuning the model with proprietary data, but this is expensive and requires expertise. Another approach is to include all the proprietary data in the prompt itself.

So with that being said and with that in mind, what I want to show you today is how can you actually set up an LLM, such as OpenAI, to chat with your own data.

So, okay. So usually up until now, how we are communicating with LLM models such as OpenAI or LLAMA or any other model, we are just putting some questions, we have a user, he has a question and the model is going to respond to us. But the caveat here is that if we have some proprietary data, the model, unfortunately, is not trained on that data and it won't know how to respond to your question.

So I saw these days a very clear example about this. So, for example, if you want to ask about some policies from your company, so, for example, the vacation days that you have, you cannot ask a model. You can actually have to go to the internal guidelines and policies in your company or to the HR and you have to ask the person and you have to spend time on all of this back and forth. So what we actually can do is we have a way to give the proprietary data to and give a context to the model in order to help us to ask these kind of questions.

So now there are a few more, there are a few approaches that we can actually take. First of all, I want to emphasize when I'm saying proprietary data, some of you probably go directly with the thought to privacy concerns. So there are two things that you can do here. If you are concerned about the privacy of your data, you can actually use a model that you are hosting yourself. So, for example, you can get Lama three models which are open source. You can host them on any cloud provider and you are then sure that your data never leaves this whole environment in this whole architecture. So you have totally control and total privacy for this workshop. I use the open AI just for the convenience because it's already public. It's already there and I don't have to spend time to set it up. But keep it in mind, if you want total privacy, you can host your own model. But not all proprietary data is also sensitive data. So we can actually have a public documentation for an open source project and things like that, that we just can feed to a third party model. So you don't have to worry about that all the time.

So getting back to the presentation and to the approach itself, the first thing that comes to mind is that we can fine tune the model with the proprietary data. But unfortunately, although this is the best thing that we can do, because then the model will natively know the things about the data, this is very expensive and requires machine learning expertise. So fine tuning is actually an art and you have to know how to do it in order to do it right. And you also have to have a lot of proprietary data because otherwise, if you don't have a lot of data about the subject, you won't really make a difference in the model itself because the model is huge. It knows a lot of data. So if I'm just adding a few sentences about a certain topic, it will just get lost in all of the data that is already there. So for this kind of application, fine tuning, it might not really be a solution. So we can actually go and do the naive brute force approach and we can put all the proprietary data into the prompt itself. So before actually asking a question, we can say to the model, here is all the data from my company, all the guidelines or all the policies.

QnA

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