Category: GenAI

A colleague told me about Ollama, which allows you to get LLMs working on a local machine. I was so excited about this that I downloaded the orca-mini model. Due to terrible hotel wifi I used my mobile internet and blew out the limit on that. Oops.

Anyway, it is very easy to get Ollama working. Just download and install the software, then run ollama run llama2. It has a simple REST interface:

curl -X POST http://localhost:11434/api/generate -d '{
    "model": "orca-mini",
    "prompt":"tell me a joke"                 
   }'

It was easy enough to get this working with LangChain4J, although the APIs were not quite the same as for the OpenAPI models.

import dev.langchain4j.data.message.AiMessage;
import dev.langchain4j.model.chat.ChatLanguageModel;
import dev.langchain4j.model.ollama.OllamaChatModel;
import dev.langchain4j.model.output.Response;

public class App
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {

        String modelName = "orca-mini";
        String localUrl = "http://localhost:11434/"; 

        ChatLanguageModel model =
                OllamaChatModel.builder().baseUrl(localUrl).modelName(modelName).build();


        String answer = model.generate("tell me a joke about space");

        System.out.println("Reply\n" + answer);
    }

While these local models are less powerful than OpenAPI they seem fairly decent on a first examination. They also a much cheaper way to work with an LLM and I am going to use this to set up a simple RAG (retrieval augmented generation) example in LangChain4J.

I found myself with some free time this week when train problems forced me to travel from Manchester to Sheffield via Leeds. I used that delay to set up a basic ‘Hello World’ example using Langchain4J. This proved a touch harder than expected.

The example on https://langchain4j.github.io/langchain4j/docs/get-started/ used a generate method on ChatLanguageModel that didn’t work for the latest versions of the libraries (0.26.1 at the time of writing).

I soon cobbled together some working code using the latest version of the langchain4j-core and langchain4j libraries as well as a langchain4j-open-ai dependency. I originally used a couple of hello world queries, which produced boring responses, so I decided to ask OpenAI to tell me a joke.

package com.orbific;

import dev.langchain4j.data.message.AiMessage;
import dev.langchain4j.model.chat.ChatLanguageModel;
import dev.langchain4j.model.openai.OpenAiChatModel;
import dev.langchain4j.model.output.Response;

public class App
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {

        ChatLanguageModel model = OpenAiChatModel.builder()
                .apiKey(ApiKeys.OPENAI_API_KEY)
            .build();

        String message = "Tell me a joke.";
        AiMessage mine = AiMessage.aiMessage(message);
        Response<AiMessage> answer = model.generate(mine);
        System.out.println("Reply\n" + answer.content().text());
    }
}

The response made me smile:

Why don’t scientists trust atoms?

Because they make up everything!

What’s weird is that I kept getting the same joke, even when setting a higher temperature in the model or rephrasing the query. But requesting a joke about cats produced a pun about cheetahs. And asking repeatedly for jokes about underwater creatures brings back different responses. There’s obviously something here that I’m missing.

I set up a paid chatGPT account but that did not seem to grant me access to the API, and I also had to top up some credits as well. I’m not entirely sure whether I needed the paid account so will look into that before the subscription renews.

There’s an interesting question as to whether it would have been faster for me to read the documentation rather than flail around for a solution, but that’s the whole point of a quickstart, right? Although my flailing wasn’t helped much by tiredness and a dodgy mobile internet connection.

I have a genuine excitement about getting this working. It’s not much, but it opens up some exciting possibilities. Now to go and read some documentation.