t’s an exciting time to build with large language models (LLMs). Over the past year, LLMs have become “good enough” for real-world applications. The pace of improvements in LLMs, coupled with a parade of demos on social media, will fuel an estimated $200B investment in AI by 2025. LLMs are also broadly accessible, allowing everyone, not just ML engineers and scientists, to build intelligence into their products. While the barrier to entry for building AI products has been lowered, creating those effective beyond a demo remains a deceptively difficult endeavor.

We’ve identified some crucial, yet often neglected, lessons and methodologies informed by machine learning that are essential for developing products based on LLMs. … Our goal is to make this a practical guide to building successful products around LLMs, drawing from our own experiences and pointing to examples from around the industry. We’ve spent the past year getting our hands dirty and gaining valuable lessons, often the hard way. While we don’t claim to speak for the entire industry, here we share some advice and lessons for anyone building products with LLMs. — Read More