AI Agents in Production: From Prototype to Reality - Part 10
This blog post, the tenth and final installment in a series on AI agents, focuses on deploying AI agents to production. It covers evaluating agent performance, addressing common issues, and managing costs. The post emphasizes the importance of a robust evaluation system, providing potential solutions for performance issues, and outlining cost management strategies such as response caching, using smaller models, and implementing router models.
Operationalize your Prompt Engineering Skills with Azure Prompt Flow
In today’s AI-driven world, prompt engineering is a game-changing skill for developers and professionals alike. With Azure Prompt Flow, you can harness the power of open-source LLMs to solve real-world operational challenges! This article guides you through using Azure’s robust tools to build, deploy, and refine your own LLM apps—from chatbots to data extraction tools and beyond. Whether you're just starting or looking to sharpen your AI expertise, this guide has everything you need to unlock new possibilities with prompt engineering. Dive in and take your tech journey to the next level!Embracing Responsible AI: A Comprehensive Guide and Call to Action
In an age where artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, the need for responsible AI practices has never been more critical. From healthcare to finance, AI systems influence decisions affecting millions of people. As developers, organizations, and users, we are responsible for ensuring that these technologies are designed, deployed, and evaluated ethically. This blog will delve into the principles of responsible AI, the importance of assessing generative AI applications, and provide a call to action to engage with the Microsoft Learn Module on responsible AI evaluations. What is Responsible AI? Responsible AI encompasses a set of principles and practices aimed at ensuring that AI technologies are developed and used in ways that are ethical, fair, and accountable. Here are the core principles that define responsible AI: Fairness AI systems must be designed to avoid bias and discrimination. This means ensuring that the data used to train these systems is representative and that the algorithms do not favor one group over another. Fairness is crucial in applications like hiring, lending, and law enforcement, where biased AI can lead to significant societal harm. Transparency Transparency involves making AI systems understandable to users and stakeholders. This includes providing clear explanations of how AI models make decisions and what data they use. Transparency builds trust and allows users to challenge or question AI decisions when necessary. Accountability Developers and organizations must be held accountable for the outcomes of their AI systems. This includes establishing clear lines of responsibility for AI decisions and ensuring that there are mechanisms in place to address any negative consequences that arise from AI use. Privacy AI systems often rely on vast amounts of data, raising concerns about user privacy. Responsible AI practices involve implementing robust data protection measures, ensuring compliance with regulations like GDPR, and being transparent about how user data is collected, stored, and used. The Importance of Evaluating Generative AI Applications Generative AI, which includes technologies that can create text, images, music, and more, presents unique challenges and opportunities. Evaluating these applications is essential for several reasons: Quality Assessment Evaluating the output quality of generative AI applications is crucial to ensure that they meet user expectations and ethical standards. Poor-quality outputs can lead to misinformation, misrepresentation, and a loss of trust in AI technologies. Custom Evaluators Learning to create and use custom evaluators allows developers to tailor assessments to specific applications and contexts. This flexibility is vital in ensuring that the evaluation process aligns with the intended use of the AI system. Synthetic Datasets Generative AI can be used to create synthetic datasets, which can help in training AI models while addressing privacy concerns and data scarcity. Evaluating these synthetic datasets is essential to ensure they are representative and do not introduce bias. Call to Action: Engage with the Microsoft Learn Module To deepen your understanding of responsible AI and enhance your skills in evaluating generative AI applications, I encourage you to explore the Microsoft Learn Module available at this link. What You Will Learn: Concepts and Methodologies: The module covers essential frameworks for evaluating generative AI, including best practices and methodologies that can be applied across various domains. Hands-On Exercises: Engage in practical, code-first exercises that simulate real-world scenarios. These exercises will help you apply the concepts learned tangibly, reinforcing your understanding. Prerequisites: An Azure subscription (you can create one for free). Basic familiarity with Azure and Python programming. Tools like Docker and Visual Studio Code for local development. Why This Matters By participating in this module, you are not just enhancing your skills; you are contributing to a broader movement towards responsible AI. As AI technologies continue to evolve, the demand for professionals who understand and prioritize ethical considerations will only grow. Your engagement in this learning journey can help shape the future of AI, ensuring it serves humanity positively and equitably. Conclusion As we navigate the complexities of AI technology, we must prioritize responsible AI practices. By engaging with educational resources like the Microsoft Learn Module on responsible AI evaluations, we can equip ourselves with the knowledge and skills necessary to create AI systems that are not only innovative but also ethical and responsible. Join the movement towards responsible AI today! Take the first step by exploring the Microsoft Learn Module and become an advocate for ethical AI practices in your community and beyond. Together, we can ensure that AI serves as a force for good in our society. References Evaluate generative AI applications https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/evaluate-generative-ai-apps/?wt.mc_id=studentamb_263805 Azure Subscription for Students https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students/?wt.mc_id=studentamb_263805 Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/?wt.mc_id=studentamb_263805Exploring Generative AI: A Hands-on Course on Prompt Engineering for non-tech students - Part 1
Introduction Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the digital landscape through "intent-based outcome specification," a paradigm where users describe desired outcomes via detailed prompts instead of traditional commands. This course - targeting a non-developer audience - delved into the foundational principles of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on their core mechanisms and capabilities. Students learned and practiced effective prompting techniques, essential for navigating this powerful yet complex method. The course included the analysis and discussion of recent research on prompt engineering, keeping students abreast of the latest developments. The structure of the course balanced theoretical understanding and practical application, with 30% dedicated to traditional lectures and 70% to hands-on workshops and collaborative group projects. Practical exercises using models like GPT allowed students to apply their theoretical knowledge in real-world scenarios. Group projects focused on specific application domains – including music, literature and cuisine - leading to presentations, peer reviews, and instructor feedback. The course - comprising 20 hours of direct instruction - was conducted at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) campuses in Povo. Instructors Antonio Bucchiarone and Nadia Mana guided the learning journey. Additionally, Carlotta Castelluccio from Microsoft conducted a seminar on Responsible AI, emphasizing ethical considerations in AI applications. In this first part of the blog series, we are going to present the methodological framework and the tools used throughout the course. In the second part, we are going to cover the student projects’ main outcomes and key takeaways. The Card Model Template and the Flow of Cards One of the primary goals of the course was to provide a clear and comprehensive understanding of prompt engineering. This was achieved by introducing a structured framework known as the "Card Model" to define and organize generative AI tasks. In the context of this course, a card refers to a structured format or template used to define a specific task or objective for generating content or output using generative AI techniques. The Card Model serves as a conceptual framework that outlines the structure, components, and relationships involved in generating content or output using generative AI techniques. It provides a high-level abstraction of the task, capturing its essential elements and defining their interactions. Here’s a simplified model of a generative AI task: Objective: This is the overarching goal or purpose of the generative AI task, defining what needs to be achieved through the content generation process. Input: Information provided to the generative AI technique to guide the content generation process. This includes: Prompt: A starting point or stimulus to generate content, such as a partial sentence, a question, an instruction, or other forms of input. Context: Additional information or constraints that provide context for the generation task, such as background knowledge, relevant data sources, or specific requirements. Generative Model: The AI model responsible for generating content based on the input provided. Examples include pre-trained language models like OpenAI GPT-3.5Turbo, neural network architectures for text generation, or other generative AI systems. Output: The generated content produced by the generative model in response to the input, including: Generated Text: The actual output, which could be in the form of text, images, or other media. Evaluation Metrics: Criteria used to assess the quality and relevance of the generated content, including measures of coherence, relevance, fluency, and other factors depending on the specific task requirements. Feedback Loop: A mechanism for iteratively improving the generative AI model based on feedback from users or evaluators. This may involve refining the input prompts, adjusting model parameters, or incorporating additional training data to enhance performance. The Card Model helps define the key components involved in the task and their relationships, facilitating the design, execution, and evaluation of generative AI tasks in various applications. Cards Flow Model The concept of flow was also introduced in the course to provide a formal representation of the relationships between different cards composing a generative AI task. This flow model helps in visualizing and understanding the sequential and conditional transitions between different stages of a generative AI task, ensuring a structured and systematic approach to designing, executing, and evaluating generative AI processes. In more details, cards can be combined together to create complex workflows by defining specific transitions and dependencies between them. By linking these cards through directed edges, students can create intricate flows that mirror real-world applications. This pattern also helps students to break down complex tasks into smaller subtasks, described through detailed prompts and potentially addressed by different specialized models, generally leading to a more accurate final outcome. For example, a card flow might begin with a card that generates an initial story prompt. The output of this card could then flow into a card that adds contextual details, which in turn flows into another card responsible for generating the story based on the enhanced prompt. Subsequent cards could be used to evaluate the generated content, refine the prompt based on evaluation metrics, and iterate the process. To ensure a thorough understanding of these flows, students were asked to evaluate different paths within a flow. This involved analyzing how changes in one card could affect the overall output and exploring alternative pathways to achieve the desired outcome. Students were tasked with: Mapping Out Flows: Students mapped out various flows, identifying all possible paths and transitions between cards. Evaluating Paths: They evaluated each path to understand how different sequences and combinations of tasks impacted the final output. Comparing Outcomes: Students compared outcomes from different paths to determine which flow produced the most coherent, relevant, and high-quality results. Feedback and Iteration: They incorporated feedback into their flows, refining cards and transitions to optimize the generative process. By engaging in these activities, students gained hands-on experience in managing complex generative AI tasks, learning to anticipate and handle the dependencies and contingencies that arise in practical applications. This exercise not only reinforced their understanding of prompt engineering but also highlighted the importance of structured planning and iterative improvement in generative AI projects. The Azure AI Proxy Playground Students learned to interact with OpenAI models through the GUI offered by the Azure AI Proxy Playground. The service is an open-source solution which provides a Playground-like experience to explore the Azure OpenAI chat completions using a time-bound event code with different models and parameters. It’s designed for educational scenarios (e.g., a course, a hackathon, or a workshop) where students might not have access to an Azure subscription enabled with Azure OpenAI service and/or are not familiar with the Azure ecosystem and how to provision and consume Azure AI resources. By leveraging this solution, we were able to provide students with a simplified lab environment, where all the complexity related to the Cloud resources provisioning and model deployments was hidden to the final user and managed through a single Azure subscription, connected to the Proxy Playground. This was particularly helpful in the context of a course whose audience was non-technical and whose focus was learning to interact with large language models through prompt engineering techniques. For the sake of the course, we provisioned a gpt-3.5 turbo instance, so all the students’ interactions via the playground happened with that specific model. Tool GUI and Card Model mapping The Playground GUI is composed of several elements. Most of them can be directly mapped with the Card Model components, ensuring consistency between the theoretical concepts and the actual experimentations. User prompt: free-form text field used to enter the user request to the model. It’s the prompt component of the input in the card model. System message: free-form text field used to enter additional information to use in responses, data sources and/or tone and style specifications. It maps with the context component of the input in the card model. Configuration: parameters to tune the degree of randomness of the responses. It also includes a dropdown menu to select the model to use as chat engine, what we call generative model in the card template. Assistant response: in the chat session the user can read the model’s response, aka the generated text component of the output in the card model. Summary In this article, we covered the methodological framework and tools used in the Prompt Engineering course at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, to teach non-tech students to effectively interact with generative AI models. We explored the "Card Model" - a structured approach to define and organize generative AI tasks - and the concept of the "flow", which further structures the relationships between tasks, aiding in the creation of complex workflows. Students utilized the Azure AI Proxy Playground, an open-source GUI, to interact with OpenAI models like GPT-3.5 Turbo, applying their theoretical knowledge in practical scenarios without needing extensive technical skills. In the second part of the blog series, we will delve into the main outcomes of the students' projects and the key takeaways from their practical applications.Exploring AI Development and Management: A Journey through Contoso Chat and LLM Ops
In this blog, we'll navigate through the world of AI models, exploring Contoso Chat, Prompt Engineering, limitations of Prompt Engineering, and Large Language Models. We'll introduce tools like the RAG Pattern and Azure AI Studio that can boost AI responses and system performance. Ready to dive into the intricacies of AI development and management? Join us!Ethical AI: Nurup Naimji’s Vision for Responsible Growth in AI Entrepreneurship
Learn more from Microsoft Startup 3-2-1 Go Check and how to Centralise Your Checking Flow 3-2-1-GoCheck enables HR, risk, compliance, hiring managers, candidates, previous employers and other third parties to all be on the same platform. Make lengthy e-mail exchanges, phone calls and time consuming inquiries tedious tasks for everyone involved in the checking journey all with the Power of Microsoft AI and Microsoft Foundershub
