Designing Large Language Model Applications

Chapter 10. Interfacing LLMs with External Tools

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In the first two parts of the book, we have seen how effective standalone LLMs can be in solving a wide variety of tasks. In order to effectively harness their full range of capabilities in an organization, they have to be integrated into the existing data and software ecosystem. Unlike traditional software systems, LLMs can generate autonomous actions to interact with other components of the ecosystem, thus bringing a degree of flexibility never seen before in the world of software. This flexibility unlocks a whole host of use cases that were previously considered impossible.

There is another reason why we need LLMs to interact with software and external data. As we know too well, current LLMs have significant limitations, some of which we discussed in Chapter 1. To recap some key points:

• Since it is expensive to retrain LLMs or keep them continuously updated, they have a knowledge ...