LangChain is a framework designed to simplify the creation of applications using large language models (LLMs). As a language model integration framework, LangChain's use-cases largely overlap with those of language models in general, including document analysis and summarization, chatbots, and code analysis.[2]

LangChain
Developer(s)Harrison Chase
Initial releaseOctober 2022
Stable release
0.1.16[1] / 11 April 2024; 4 months ago (11 April 2024)
Repositorygithub.com/langchain-ai/langchain
Written inPython and JavaScript
TypeSoftware framework for large language model application development
LicenseMIT License
WebsiteLangChain.com

History

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LangChain was launched in October 2022 as an open source project by Harrison Chase, while working at machine learning startup Robust Intelligence. The project quickly garnered popularity,[3] with improvements from hundreds of contributors on GitHub, trending discussions on Twitter, lively activity on the project's Discord server, many YouTube tutorials, and meetups in San Francisco and London. In April 2023, LangChain had incorporated and the new startup raised over $20 million in funding at a valuation of at least $200 million from venture firm Sequoia Capital, a week after announcing a $10 million seed investment from Benchmark.[4][5]

In the third quarter of 2023, the LangChain Expression Language (LCEL) was introduced, which provides a declarative way to define chains of actions.[6][7]

In October 2023 LangChain introduced LangServe, a deployment tool to host LCEL code as a production-ready API.[8]

Capabilities

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LangChain's developers highlight the framework's applicability to use-cases including chatbots,[9] retrieval-augmented generation,[10] document summarization,[11] and synthetic data generation.[12]

As of March 2023, LangChain included integrations with systems including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure cloud storage; API wrappers for news, movie information, and weather; Bash for summarization, syntax and semantics checking, and execution of shell scripts; multiple web scraping subsystems and templates; few-shot learning prompt generation support; finding and summarizing "todo" tasks in code; Google Drive documents, spreadsheets, and presentations summarization, extraction, and creation; Google Search and Microsoft Bing web search; OpenAI, Anthropic, and Hugging Face language models; iFixit repair guides and wikis search and summarization; MapReduce for question answering, combining documents, and question generation; N-gram overlap scoring; PyPDF, pdfminer, fitz, and pymupdf for PDF file text extraction and manipulation; Python and JavaScript code generation, analysis, and debugging; Milvus vector database[13] to store and retrieve vector embeddings; Weaviate vector database[14] to cache embedding and data objects; Redis cache database storage; Python RequestsWrapper and other methods for API requests; SQL and NoSQL databases including JSON support; Streamlit, including for logging; text mapping for k-nearest neighbors search; time zone conversion and calendar operations; tracing and recording stack symbols in threaded and asynchronous subprocess runs; and the Wolfram Alpha website and SDK.[15] As of April 2023, it can read from more than 50 document types and data sources.[16]

LangChain tools

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Tool name Account required? API key required? Licencing Features Documentation URL
Alpha Vantage No Yes Proprietary Financial data, analytics https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/alpha_vantage
Apify No Yes Commercial Web scraping, automation https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/apify
ArXiv No No Open Source Scientific papers, research https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/arxiv
AWS Lambda Yes Yes Proprietary Serverless computing https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/awslambda
Bash No No Open source Shell environment access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/bash
Bearly Code Interpreter No Yes Commercial Remote Python code execution https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/bearly
Bing Search No Yes Proprietary Search engine https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/bing_search
Brave Search No No Open source Privacy-focused search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/brave_search
ChatGPT Plugins No Yes Proprietary ChatGPT https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/chatgpt_plugins
Connery No Yes Commercial API actions https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/connery
Dall-E Image Generator No Yes Proprietary Text-to-image generation https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/dalle_image_generator
DataForSEO No Yes Commercial SEO data, analytics https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/dataforseo
DuckDuckGo Search No No Open source Privacy-focused search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/ddg
E2B Data Analysis No No Open source Data analysis https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/e2b_data_analysis
Eden AI No Yes Commercial AI tools, APIs https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/edenai_tools
Eleven Labs Text2Speech No Yes Commercial Text-to-speech https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/eleven_labs_tts
Exa Search No Yes Commercial Web search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/exa_search
File System No No Open source File system interaction https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/filesystem
Golden Query No Yes Commercial Natural language queries https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/golden_query
Google Cloud Text-to-Speech Yes Yes Proprietary Text-to-speech https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_cloud_texttospeech
Google Drive Yes Yes Proprietary Google Drive access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_drive
Google Finance Yes Yes Proprietary Financial data https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_finance
Google Jobs Yes Yes Proprietary Job search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_jobs
Google Lens Yes Yes Proprietary Visual search, recognition https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_lens
Google Places Yes Yes Proprietary Location-based services https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_places
Google Scholar Yes Yes Proprietary Scholarly article search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_scholar
Google Search Yes Yes Proprietary Search engine https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_search
Google Serper No Yes Commercial SERP scraping https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_serper
Google Trends Yes Yes Proprietary Trend data https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/google_trends
Gradio No No Open source Machine learning UIs https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/gradio_tools
GraphQL No No Open source API queries https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/graphql
HuggingFace Hub No No Open source Hugging Face models, datasets https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/huggingface_tools
Human as a tool No No N/A Human input https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/human_tools
IFTTT WebHooks No Yes Commercial Web service automation https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/ifttt
Ionic Shopping No Yes Commercial Shopping https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/ionic_shopping
Lemon Agent No Yes Commercial Lemon AI interaction https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/lemonai
Memorize No No Open source Fine-tune LLM to memorize information using unsupervised learning https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/memorize
Nuclia No Yes Commercial Indexing of unstructured data https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/nuclia
OpenWeatherMap No Yes Commercial Weather data https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/openweathermap
Polygon Stock Market API No Yes Commercial Stock market data https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/polygon
PubMed No No Open source Biomedical literature https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/pubmed
Python REPL No No Open source Python shell https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/python
Reddit Search No No Open source Reddit search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/reddit_search
Requests No No Open source HTTP requests https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/requests
SceneXplain No No Open source Model explanations https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/sceneXplain
Search No No Open source Query various search services https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/search_tools
SearchApi No Yes Commercial Query various search services https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/searchapi
SearxNG No No Open source Privacy-focused search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/searx_search
Semantic Scholar API No No Open source Academic paper search https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/semanticscholar
SerpAPI No Yes Commercial Search engine results page scraping https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/serpapi
StackExchange No No Open source Stack Exchange access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/stackexchange
Tavily Search No Yes Commercial Question answering https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/tavily_search
Twilio No Yes Commercial Communication APIs https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/twilio
Wikidata No No Open source Structured data access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/wikidata
Wikipedia No No Open source Wikipedia access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/wikipedia
Wolfram Alpha No Yes Proprietary Computational knowledge https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/wolfram_alpha
Yahoo Finance News No Yes Commercial Financial news https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/yahoo_finance_news
Youtube No Yes Commercial YouTube access https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/youtube
Zapier Natural Language Actions No Yes Commercial Workflow automation https://python.langchain.com/docs/integrations/tools/zapier


References

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  1. ^ "Release 0.1.16". 11 April 2024. Retrieved 23 April 2024.
  2. ^ Buniatyan, Davit (2023). "Code Understanding Using LangChain". Activeloop.
  3. ^ Auffarth, Ben (2023). Generative AI with LangChain. Birmingham: Packt Publishing. p. 83. ISBN 9781835083468.
  4. ^ Palazzolo, Stephanie (2023-04-13). "AI startup LangChain taps Sequoia to lead funding round at a valuation of at least $200 million". Business Insider. Archived from the original on 2023-04-18. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  5. ^ Griffith, Erin; Metz, Cade (2023-03-14). "'Let 1,000 Flowers Bloom': A.I. Funding Frenzy Escalates". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2023-04-18. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  6. ^ Mansurova, Mariya (2023-10-30). "Topic Modelling in production: Leveraging LangChain to move from ad-hoc Jupyter Notebooks to production modular service". towardsdatascience.com. Retrieved 2024-07-08.
  7. ^ "LangChain Expression Language". langchain.dev. 2023-08-01. Retrieved 2024-07-08.
  8. ^ "Introducing LangServe, the best way to deploy your LangChains". LangChain Blog. 2023-10-12. Retrieved 2023-10-17.
  9. ^ "Chatbots | 🦜️🔗 Langchain". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2023-11-26.
  10. ^ "Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) | 🦜️🔗 Langchain". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2023-11-26.
  11. ^ "Summarization | 🦜️🔗 Langchain". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2023-11-26.
  12. ^ "Synthetic data generation | 🦜️🔗 Langchain". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2023-11-26.
  13. ^ "Milvus — LangChain". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2023-10-29.
  14. ^ "Weaviate". python.langchain.com. Retrieved 2024-01-17.
  15. ^ Hug, Daniel Patrick (2023-03-08). "Hierarchical topic tree of LangChain's integrations" (PDF). GitHub. Archived from the original on 2023-04-29. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  16. ^ "Document Loaders — LangChain 0.0.142". python.langchain.com. Archived from the original on 2023-04-18. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
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