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Welcome to the Instructor Blog

The goal of the blog is to capture some content that does not neatly fit within documentation or the cookbooks.

Advanced Topics

  1. What is Query Understanding, how does it go beyond embeddings?
  2. How can one achieve GPT-4 level summaries using GPT-3.5-turbo?
  3. What are the basics of Guardrails and Validation in AI models?
  4. How does one validate citations in AI-generated content?
  5. What are the methods and benefits of fine-tuning and distillation in AI models?

Learning Python

Integrations

Media

Simple Synthetic Data Generation

What that people have been using instructor for is to generate synthetic data rather than extracting data itself. We can even use the J-Schemo extra fields to give specific examples to control how we generate data.

Consider the example below. We'll likely generate very simple names.

from typing import Iterable
from pydantic import BaseModel
import instructor
from openai import OpenAI


# Define the UserDetail model
class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int


# Patch the OpenAI client to enable the response_model functionality
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())


def generate_fake_users(count: int) -> Iterable[UserDetail]:
    return client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        response_model=Iterable[UserDetail],
        messages=[
            {"role": "user", "content": f"Generate a {count} synthetic users"},
        ],
    )


for user in generate_fake_users(5):
    print(user)
    """
    name='Alice' age=25
    name='Bob' age=30
    name='Charlie' age=35
    name='David' age=40
    name='Eve' age=45
    """

Leveraging Simple Examples

We might want to set examples as part of the prompt by leveraging Pydantics configuration. We can set examples directly in the JSON scheme itself.

from typing import Iterable
from pydantic import BaseModel
import instructor
from openai import OpenAI


# Define the UserDetail model
class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str = Field(examples=["Timothee Chalamet", "Zendaya"])
    age: int


# Patch the OpenAI client to enable the response_model functionality
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())


def generate_fake_users(count: int) -> Iterable[UserDetail]:
    return client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        response_model=Iterable[UserDetail],
        messages=[
            {"role": "user", "content": f"Generate a {count} synthetic users"},
        ],
    )


for user in generate_fake_users(5):
    print(user)
    """
    name='Timothee Chalamet' age=25
    name='Zendaya' age=24
    name='Keanu Reeves' age=56
    name='Scarlett Johansson' age=36
    name='Chris Hemsworth' age=37
    """

By incorporating names of celebrities as examples, we have shifted towards generating synthetic data featuring well-known personalities, moving away from the simplistic, single-word names previously used.

Leveraging Complex Example

To effectively generate synthetic examples with more nuance, lets upgrade to the "gpt-4-turbo-preview" model, use model level examples rather than attribute level examples:

import instructor

from typing import Iterable
from pydantic import BaseModel, Field, ConfigDict
from openai import OpenAI


# Define the UserDetail model
class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    """Old Wizards"""
    name: str
    age: int

    model_config = ConfigDict(
        json_schema_extra={
            "examples": [
                {"name": "Gandalf the Grey", "age": 1000},
                {"name": "Albus Dumbledore", "age": 150},
            ]
        }
    )


# Patch the OpenAI client to enable the response_model functionality
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())


def generate_fake_users(count: int) -> Iterable[UserDetail]:
    return client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-4-turbo-preview",
        response_model=Iterable[UserDetail],
        messages=[
            {"role": "user", "content": f"Generate `{count}` synthetic examples"},
        ],
    )


for user in generate_fake_users(5):
    print(user)
    """
    name='Merlin' age=196
    name='Saruman the White' age=543
    name='Radagast the Brown' age=89
    name='Morgoth' age=901
    name='Filius Flitwick' age=105 
    """

Leveraging Descriptions

By adjusting the descriptions within our Pydantic models, we can subtly influence the nature of the synthetic data generated. This method allows for a more nuanced control over the output, ensuring that the generated data aligns more closely with our expectations or requirements.

For instance, specifying "Fancy French sounding names" as a description for the name field in our UserDetail model directs the generation process to produce names that fit this particular criterion, resulting in a dataset that is both diverse and tailored to specific linguistic characteristics.

import instructor

from typing import Iterable
from pydantic import BaseModel, Field
from openai import OpenAI


# Define the UserDetail model
class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str = Field(description="Fancy French sounding names")
    age: int


# Patch the OpenAI client to enable the response_model functionality
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())


def generate_fake_users(count: int) -> Iterable[UserDetail]:
    return client.chat.completions.create(
        model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
        response_model=Iterable[UserDetail],
        messages=[
            {"role": "user", "content": f"Generate `{count}` synthetic users"},
        ],
    )


for user in generate_fake_users(5):
    print(user)
    """
    name='Jean' age=25
    name='Claire' age=30
    name='Pierre' age=22
    name='Marie' age=27
    name='Luc' age=35
    """

Structured Output for Open Source and Local LLMS

Originally, Instructor facilitated API interactions solely via the OpenAI SDK, with an emphasis on function call by incorporating Pydantic for structured data validation and serialization.

As the year progressed, we expanded our toolkit by integrating JSON mode, thus enhancing our adaptability to vision models and open source models. This advancement now enables us to support an extensive range of models, from GPT and Mistral to virtually any model accessible through Ollama and Hugging Face, facilitated by llama-cpp-python. For more insights into leveraging JSON mode with various models, refer back to our detailed guide on Patching.

If you want to check out a course on how to use Instructor with Pydantic, check out our course on Steering language models towards structured outputs..

Seamless Support with Langsmith

Its a common misconception that LangChain's LangSmith is only compatible with LangChain's models. In reality, LangSmith is a unified DevOps platform for developing, collaborating, testing, deploying, and monitoring LLM applications. In this blog we will explore how LangSmith can be used to enhance the OpenAI client alongside instructor.

Free course on Weights and Biases

I just released a free course on wits and biases. It goes over the material from tutorial. Check it out at wandb.courses its free and open to everyone and just under an hour long!

Click the image to access the course

Introduction to Caching in Python

Instructor makes working with language models easy, but they are still computationally expensive.

Today, we're diving into optimizing instructor code while maintaining the excellent DX offered by Pydantic models. We'll tackle the challenges of caching Pydantic models, typically incompatible with pickle, and explore solutions that use decorators like functools.cache. Then, we'll craft custom decorators with diskcache and redis to support persistent caching and distributed systems.

Generators and LLM Streaming

Latency is crucial, especially in eCommerce and newer chat applications like ChatGPT. Streaming is the solution that enables us to enhance the user experience without the need for faster response times.

And what makes streaming possible? Generators!

Verifying LLM Citations with Pydantic

Ensuring the accuracy of information is crucial. This blog post explores how Pydantic's powerful and flexible validators can enhance data accuracy through citation verification.

We'll start with using a simple substring check to verify citations. Then we'll use instructor itself to power an LLM to verify citations and align answers with the given citations. Finally, we'll explore how we can use these techniques to generate a dataset of accurate responses.

Batch Processing OpenAI using asyncio and Instructor with Python

Today, I will introduce you to various approaches for using asyncio in Python. We will apply this to batch process data using instructor and learn how to use asyncio.gather and asyncio.as_completed for concurrent data processing. Additionally, we will explore how to limit the number of concurrent requests to a server using asyncio.Semaphore.

Smarter Summaries w/ Finetuning GPT-3.5 and Chain of Density

Discover how to distil an iterative method like Chain Of Density into a single finetuned model using Instructor

In this article, we'll guide you through implementing the original Chain of Density method using Instructor, then show how to distile a GPT 3.5 model to match GPT-4's iterative summarization capabilities. Using these methods were able to decrease latency by 20x, reduce costs by 50x and maintain entity density.

By the end you'll end up with a GPT 3.5 model, (fine-tuned using Instructor's great tooling), capable of producing summaries that rival the effectiveness of Chain of Density [Adams et al. (2023)]. As always, all code is readily available in our examples/chain-of-density folder in our repo for your reference.