Building Generative AI Services with FastAPI

Preface

Generative AI (GenAI) is taking the world by storm since the release of technologies like ChatGPT. This new type of AI can create content in various modalities (such as text, audio, video, etc.) by learning to mimic patterns from its training data. With the increased advancement in GenAI capabilities, many businesses are investing in off-the-shelf or custom AI tools. These tools require maintainable and scalable backend services that can adapt to high demand.

AI capabilities are exciting because they open the door to endless possibilities that unlock the potential for new tools. Before generative AI, developers had to write scripts and train optimization models to build automation and data pipelines for their processing of unstructured data like corpora of texts. This process could be tedious, error-prone, and applicable only to limited use cases. However, with the rise of GenAI models such as large language models (LLMs), we can now digest, compare, and summarize unstructured datasets and documents; reword complex ideas; and generate visualizations and illustrations.

While most generative models such as ChatGPT are excellent at what they do on their own, can you imagine the possibilities when we connect them to the internet, our own databases, and other services? If we can just “talk” to our services in natural language or give them some image, video, or audio and get them to do things for us, it opens up so many opportunities to create newly accessible and automated ...