i’m tinkering around with trying to understand agentic AI and tool-use.
What I would like to be able to do is have the AI read a Google Sheet and use Tools to build multiple emails for me.
Hours 1-2
I read that LangChain is a framework for creating Agents. I presume it’s free? I followed these instructions to get a local LLM installed on my laptop. These instructions said to use Ollama so that’s the path I’m heading down. https://js.langchain.com/docs/tutorials/local_rag
My laptop was able to read the example document. That’s a win. I have a Macbook Air M3 with 16GB of RAM that I bought in September 2024 for about $1,400 USD. In other words — a firmly middle-of-the-road new Mac. I presume it’s going to run slow as molasses?
Hours 3
Back to tools. The Ollama Blog announced tool support in July 2024 which led me to this code example. Now I think we’re in business!
https://github.com/ollama/ollama-python/blob/main/examples/tools/main.py
Reading the docs for Llama 3.2B, it appears this new version is OK for tools and designed to run on less powerful machines. I don’t know what 1B or 3B means. I guess 3B words indexed?
Ollama blog notes were very helpful in explaining the steps necessary to index my documents so that AI will be able to do something with the text. It involves making embeddings by using an indexer and a vector store. I don’t know what that means. Hopefully I don’t need to know? https://ollama.com/blog/llms-in-obsidian
Hour 4
So much information my mind is spinning right now.
This agent tutorial is exactly what I’d like to figure out. https://python.langchain.com/docs/tutorials/agents
LangChain has a lot of community-contributed tools. Most interesting tools I’m seeing right now are these tools:
- Twilio – Can I get the Agent to create a message for me? Limited to SMS and WhatsApp messages so not quite what I’m looking for.
- Playwright Browser Toolkit – maybe too advanced for a newbie. Requests may be better.
- Requests interesting for scraping sites. I wonder if it could help me categorize blog content.
- RSS Loader – could it help me curate stories?
- Obsidian – for on-my-computer notes
Hour 5
https://python.langchain.com/docs/how_to/tool_calling
lost in the ether of wrestling with getting this to call a feed and find relevant articles. Realizing now that reading content has certainly been done-to-death. How can I make this do something more interesting for me?
Hour 6
struggled with having Ollama read and summarize my Flipboard magazine. this has been a waste of an hour
Hour 7
Back to the original idea of why did I want agent AI in the first place?
Goal: I want to increase sales. General one-message-for-all approach is not working. I want to split people up into groups/clusters of interests.
I also want to find a pattern of behavior that occurs before people buy.
It has been suggested to me that a Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a good way to identify this behavior. GNN is a whole different rabbit hole to look into. My friend told me to look at JanusGraph
At this point, I’m not quite sure how AI and Graphs fits into the picture here. The insight will come eventually.