Hey there! LangChain is an open-source Python framework that lets you build powerful applications by connecting large language models like GPT-3 with external data sources and computations.
Developed by Anthropic and released in October 2024, LangChain gives you a way to overcome some key limitations of vanilla language models like ChatGPT.
Now, ChatGPT can provide impressively human-like responses in conversation. But it has some major weaknesses:
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Its knowledge is limited to what was available on the internet up to 2021. Anything after that is a blank.
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It cannot provide truly factual, reliable answers requiring real-world expertise. Ask it about medicine, law, engineering and you‘ll get responses that sound convincing but lack depth.
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Each response is independent and isolated. ChatGPT has no memory or state carrying over between interactions.
This is where LangChain comes in. LangChain bridges these gaps by letting you integrate large language models with databases, APIs, web scraping results, and more.
This combination of capabilities allows LangChain apps to provide informative, trustworthy answers across many real-world domains.
Let‘s explore some of the key benefits LangChain offers and how you can get started using it!
Why LangChain is a game-changer
There are several compelling advantages LangChain provides over vanilla LLMs:
🤖 Integration with LLMs from multiple providers
LangChain gives you a standard interface to connect with LLMs from top providers like Anthropic, Cohere, Google, Hugging Face, and OpenAI.
This makes it easy to leverage different models in your app for different use cases. For example, you could use:
- Anthropic‘s Claude for certain types of queries where accuracy is critical
- OpenAI‘s GPT-3 for more conversational interactions
- Google‘s LaMDA for natural-language capabilities
- Hugging Face‘s Blooma for biological/medical knowledge
With LangChain, you can easily swap models to fit your needs.
📜 Flexible prompt programming
LangChain provides tools to help you construct prompts appropriately, manage long-running conversations, incorporate chat history into prompts, and supply external context to influence model behavior.
This advanced prompt engineering unlocks more controlled, optimized use of LLMs.
🧠 Stateful sessions with memory
LangChain includes memory components that allow your app to maintain state across conversations. It can remember facts, keep track of entities mentioned, and recall past interactions.
This kind of memory is essential for coherent chatbot experiences that mimic human conversation flow.
🕵🏻 Modular orchestration
You can build agents with LangChain that analyze the user input and dynamically call different tools as needed: LLMs for generation, databases for retrieval, APIs for world knowledge, etc.
This flexible orchestration allows your app to combine the best capabilities according to the context.
As you can see, LangChain opens up much more advanced LLM use cases compared to vanilla ChatGPT.
Adoption and growth
Since its launch in October 2024, LangChain has seen impressive growth:
- 2,400+ stars on GitHub
- 650+ contributors
- Average of 200+ new commits per month
This makes it one of the fastest growing open-source AI projects out there.
Anthropic recently raised $680 million in funding, with plans to expand LangChain capabilities. CEO Dario Amodei has stated that LangChain is key to "build AI assistants that are helpful, harmless, and honest."
With this level of investment and a robust community, expect LangChain to rapidly evolve in 2024 and beyond.
LangChain‘s vision
According to Daniel Chapman, Anthropic‘s VP of AI Research who created LangChain:
"We‘re building tools like LangChain to empower developers to create the next generation of AI assistants that don‘t just converse, but actually help – with knowledge seeking, task automation, data retrieval, and more."
Chapman has outlined plans to enhance LangChain as a platform for LLM app development:
- Broaden model integrations beyond LLMs like DALL-E for images
- Streamline injecting domain knowledge into apps
- Expand tooling for LLM coordination
- Grow data integration capabilities
- Simplify prompt programming
With this roadmap, LangChain is positioned to become the leading open-source solution for building capable, trustworthy AI apps.
Getting started using LangChain
Ready to start building with LangChain? Here‘s a quick guide to get up and running:
1. Install LangChain
First, install the LangChain library using either:
pip install langchainor
conda install langchain -c conda-forgeThis will install LangChain and all its dependencies.
2. Connect your LLM
Next, you need to connect LangChain to the large language model you want to use.
For example, to use OpenAI‘s GPT-3 API:
# Install OpenAI SDK
pip install openai
# Set API key
import os
os.environ["OPENAI_API_KEY"] = "YOUR_API_KEY" You can follow similar steps to connect Cohere, Anthropic, Google, etc.
3. Import LangChain and build your agent
With your LLM connected, you can start importing LangChain and building your agent:
from langchain import *
# Create your agent
agent = MyAgent()
# Start using LangChain capabilities!Refer to the Python or JavaScript quickstart guides.
You‘ll find examples for:
- Building a conversational chatbot
- Creating a text completion model
- Generating text embeddings
- Integrating external data
- Constructing prompts
- Orchestrating multiple AI tools
4. Join the community
As you build with LangChain, tap into the active open-source community:
- Discord – Get help debugging issues and discuss use cases
- Forums – Ask questions and find answers from other users
- GitHub – Follow development, request features, and contribute!
Integrating real-world data
While large language models have impressive capabilities, combining them with real-world data is where LangChain truly shines.
There are two primary ways LangChain ingests external data:
Document loaders
Document loaders allow you to load various data sources into a common Document format that LangChain can use:
- Text files
- CSV/TSV datasets
- JSON records
- PDFs
- Web page scrape results
- Database query results
- and more…
For example, you could load:
- Product manuals as text documents
- Customer account details from a CSV file
- Wikipedia JSON dumps
- Academic papers scraped as PDFs
This data can then be indexed for efficient retrieval.
Indexers
Indexers take the document loaders and build vector databases that can be quickly queried to find relevant documents.
Popular choices include:
- Vectorstore – Anthropic‘s vector index
- Pinecone – Vector database for production use
- Milvus – Open-source vector search engine
Once loaded and indexed, you can query your documents directly from LangChain agents.
This allows your agents to provide informative answers even for narrow domains using your custom data!
Web scraping to feed LangChain
One powerful way to supply LangChain with domain-specific data is by web scraping.
Tools like Apify make it easy to build web scrapers to extract clean, structured data from websites.
For example, you could:
- Scrape product pages to load a product database
- Crawl documentation sites to index help articles
- Build price comparison scrapers to track ecommerce sites
- Scrape niche websites related to your field to create a custom search engine
The Apify SDK lets you run this web scraping directly from LangChain code.
from apify_client import ApifyClient
from langchain import *
# Scrape a site with Apify
apify = ApifyClient("YOUR_API_KEY")
scraper = apify.actor("apify/web-scraper")
run = scraper.call(start_url="https://www.example.com", extract_xpath="//p")
# Load scrape results into LangChain
loader = ApifyLoader(run)
docs = loader.load()
# Index the documents
index = VectorstoreIndexCreator().from_loaders([loader])
# Query the index!
results = index.query("What is on example.com?")This allows you to leverage web data directly within a LangChain agent.
Apify provides a wide range of scrapers to handle different sources:
- Web Scraper – Scrape any site or template
- Unblocker – Get raw pages behind JS
- Crawler – Crawl a whole website
- API Client – Call REST APIs
- Punctuation Fixer – Clean up text
You can integrate data from any of these tools into LangChain in just a few lines of code!
Building advanced LangChain agents
By combining large language models with external data and modular logic, LangChain enables you to create remarkably advanced applications.
Let‘s walk through some examples of complex agents you could build:
Smart question answering bot
Build an agent that:
- Uses a semantic parser to analyze questions and determine intent
- Checks a SQL database for direct answers first
- Falls back to querying indexed documents if no database match
- Uses a conversational LLM when no documents are relevant
- Swaps between Claude and GPT-3 depending on question type
- Maintains conversational state using LangChain memory
This allows your bot to provide accurate, trustworthy answers across a wide range of topics!
Ecommerce support agent
Create an agent that:
- Loads customer account data like order history from a CSV
- Integrates product documentation web scrape results
- Queries a Pinecone index to find relevant help articles
- Uses Bloomua‘s medically-trained LLM for health/diet questions
- Orchestrates Anthropic, Cohere, and GPT-3 models
- Remembers customer details and past interactions
You now have a capable ecommerce support chatbot!
Expert researcher assistant
Build an agent that:
- Integrates field-specific publications scraped from databases
- Summarizes lengthy documents using AI extractors
- Answers factual queries with indexed research papers
- Generates text explanations of complex concepts
- Compares findings from multiple papers
- Cites sources and includes references
This allows you to create an AI research partner tailored to your domain!
As you can see, LangChain enables incredibly advanced applications by orchestrating LLMs, data sources, and logic modules.
The possibilities are truly endless for what you can build by providing the right design and data to LangChain.
Helpful LangChain resources
As you learn and explore building with LangChain, check out these handy resources:
Documentation
The official docs cover all LangChain concepts and capabilities. Focus on:
- Agents – Building conversational agents
- LLMs – Using models like GPT-3
- Memory – Remembering facts
- Prompt Engineering – Optimizing prompts
- Data Integration – Ingesting documents
Tutorials
The Jupyter notebook tutorials provide examples for key concepts like building chatbots, integrating LLMs, and querying data.
YouTube
This YouTube playlist contains video walkthroughs covering LangChain basics.
Community
Join the Discord to engage with other users, get help, and share ideas!
So there you have it – everything you need to get started with LangChain and build the next generation of AI assistants! By providing the right data and design, you can overcome the limits of today‘s LLMs.
I‘m excited to see what you build. Go unleash your creativity with LangChain!
