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AI without the hype: models, agents and use cases that work in production.
Mixtral 8x22B is Mistral AI's Mixture of Experts model released in April 2024: 141B total parameters but only 39B active per token, an unrestricted Apache 2.0 licence, and multilingual performance ahead of Llama 3 70B in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Production serving needs datacenter-class GPUs.
LM Studio is a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux that downloads and runs large language models on your own machine, with a polished chat interface and no terminal required. It includes an OpenAI-compatible API and RAG with your documents. For individual use it beats Ollama on user experience; for teams or production, OpenWebUI, vLLM, or TGI are the better fit.
A model trained in PyTorch or TensorFlow, running the same way on a server, a phone, a browser tab, or an ARM gateway on the factory floor: that is what ONNX Runtime solves. It turns the ONNX format into a genuinely portable artifact, exported once, at the cost of some peak performance versus a platform-native runtime.
Cuando una aplicación habla con dos o más proveedores de LLM, antes o después aparece un proxy entre medias. LiteLLM propone uno concreto, y esta es la lectura honesta de qué gana y qué cuesta.
Gemini 1.5 Pro launched in February 2024 with a verified one-million-token context window. It retrieves over 95% of data up to 530,000 tokens in recall tests, reshaping RAG system design, making full-document analysis viable, and enabling new architectural patterns through context caching.
Choosing an open LLM for enterprise in 2024 is no longer just Llama 2: Mistral, Mixtral, Qwen, Yi, DeepSeek, and Phi-2 all compete with different licences and sizes. The criteria that actually decide are commercial licence, available hardware, language support, and your own evaluation on real use cases, not just the trendy benchmark.
OpenAI released text-embedding-3 on 25 January 2024 in two variants: small and large. It improves MTEB quality over ada-002, adds variable dimensions you can truncate without retraining, and lowers the price for small. Migration pays off for most serious RAG setups, but measure real recall on your own corpus before reindexing everything.
pgvector matured in 2023-2024 with the HNSW index type and parallel construction that arrived in version 0.6. For projects already running PostgreSQL, a dedicated vector database is not needed in most cases: this guide explains when PostgreSQL is enough, how to configure the index, and where it starts to fall short.
Cohere Embed v3 is an embedding model that distinguishes queries from documents via the input_type parameter and scores intrinsic text quality, with multilingual support for over 100 languages at 1024 dimensions. It costs $0.10 per million tokens versus OpenAI's $0.02, and delivers better recall in multilingual RAG.
Text Generation Inference (TGI) is the Hugging Face stack for serving open LLMs in production: continuous batching, 4-bit and 8-bit quantization, streaming, and an OpenAI-compatible API. After a brief restrictive-licence episode in 2023, it returned to Apache 2.0 in version 2.0.
Claude 2, launched by Anthropic in July 2023, offers a 100,000-token context window and safety grounded in Constitutional AI. Against GPT-4 it wins on long-document analysis and wide-context code; GPT-4 remains ahead on complex mathematical reasoning and its tooling ecosystem.
Vector databases have gone from an experimental curiosity to the central component of most LLM-based products. This comparison covers Qdrant, Pinecone, and Weaviate: architecture, strengths, limitations, and a decision tree for choosing the right option based on your operational priorities and budget.
With quantization, model weights are stored with fewer bits (4, 5, or 8 instead of 16), so Llama 2 13B shrinks from 26 GB to about 7.5 GB. With llama.cpp it runs on an ordinary 16GB-RAM laptop with no dedicated GPU, and the quality loss is smaller than intuition suggests.
pgvector turns PostgreSQL into a fully functional vector database without adding a separate service to the stack. It extends Postgres with the vector type, IVFFlat indexes for approximate nearest-neighbour search (ANN), and the ability to combine relational SQL filters with vector ranking in a single query. For most RAG projects and internal chatbots, those limits never become a problem.
LangChain is a Python framework that unifies building LLM applications: prompt templates, retrievers over vector databases, function-calling agents, and conversational memory. It earns its keep in fast prototypes and multi-model systems, but for a single well-defined production use case, direct code usually stays more maintainable.
A text embedding is a numeric vector that encodes the meaning of a word or phrase, so that semantically similar pieces of text produce nearby vectors measured by cosine distance. The models most used in production are OpenAI ada-002, Sentence Transformers, and BGE, and they mainly serve semantic search, RAG systems, and text classification without training a classic classifier.
Function calling converts the LLM into a component that returns structured data. How it works, real use cases, and common production pitfalls.
Chroma is the easiest vector database to get started with embeddings and semantic search: install it with pip install chromadb, no extra infrastructure required, and it exposes a minimal API (add, query, delete). It suits prototypes and mid-sized RAG systems well; past a few million vectors, Qdrant or Milvus scale better.
Midjourney v5, released in March 2023, delivers consistent photorealism in skin, light, and depth of field, something v4 could not manage. The --style raw parameter disables the default artistic look, ideal for product photography. It still lacks an official API and only runs through Discord, so Stable Diffusion XL and DALL-E 3 remain more practical for automating pipelines.
In 2023, three frameworks address generative AI regulation differently: the EU AI Act sets four risk tiers with fines up to 6% of global turnover; the US NIST framework is voluntary; the UK delegates to sector regulators. Product teams should inventory AI use cases and document risks now.
Ollama makes it trivial to run models like Llama 2 or Mistral on your own computer: one binary, one command, and quantised weights downloading to disk with no compilation required. Covers installation on macOS, Linux, and Windows with an honest look at what local inference can and cannot do compared to frontier models.
Industrial predictive maintenance rarely needs deep learning: classic models such as random forests, SVMs, or survival models solve 80% of cases. The key lies in feature engineering over vibration, temperature, and power-consumption signals, with pipelines that run on as little as 50 MB of RAM without a GPU.
Five months after launch, GPT-4 excels at chained reasoning, technical writing, and medium-complexity code, but still fails at arithmetic, post-cutoff information, and cross-conversation consistency. Claude 2 wins on long context; LLaMA 2 wins on cost and privacy.
Meta released LLaMA 2 on July 18, 2023 with a royalty-free commercial licence, in three sizes (7B, 13B, 70B parameters). The 70B model matches or beats GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks. For 99.9% of organisations the licence allows download, modification, and production use with full data privacy and no fine-tuning restrictions.
