Practical Large Language Models: Using LLMs in Your Business With Python

​Jonathan Mugan is a research scientist focusing on machine learning.

​LLMs can teach you the theory of general relativity, but let’s talk about something important. We will cover how you can use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in your business using the Python ecosystem. We will survey the most popular Python libraries for interacting with LLMs and embeddings. We will cover document retrieval (semantic search) without using keywords and enabling an LLM to use information in your documents to answer questions. We will also cover how to enable LLMs to use tools and how to use LLMs to generate SQL queries so that you can build a chatbot that provides quantitative answers from your database. To store embeddings of your documents, we will survey vector databases and show how you can use Milvus, a popular open-source vector database. Finally, we will cover how LLMs work at the level of matrix multiplication so you can get a grounded sense of their strengths and weaknesses.