Introducing Nhost Assistants, your Personal LLMs

The importance of LLMs, or Large Language Models, in today's world is multifaceted, touching on aspects of efficiency, creativity, accessibility, and innovation. Their influence continues to grow as the technology advances and becomes more integrated into various aspects of daily life and work.

This is why we're thrilled to announce today's addition to the Nhost AI toolkit: Nhost Assistants - a "better LLM" that can be augmented and customized to your specific needs.

What are Assistants?

Nhost Assistants are purpose-built AIs that can extend their knowledge base with your own data (not just publicly trained data) and connect to external tools for various tasks.

The core idea is simple yet powerful: pick a base model to use, and extend it with your own data and custom actions.

Assistants can leverage services from the Nhost Stack like the GraphQL API, Nhost Run, and Nhost Functions.

Nhost as a Knowledge Base

Large language models can be inconsistent. Sometimes they nail the answer to questions, other times they output random facts from their training data.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a framework for improving the quality of the responses from LLMs by providing the model with external sources of knowledge to suplement the LLM's view of the world. This helps you ensure that the model has access to the most current and relevant data for your use-cases.

For that reason, Nhost Assistants can see their base model extended with data from the following sources:

• Nhost APIs, including the queries generated by Auto-Embeddings released yesterday, for when semantic meaning and context are more relevant than precise and long arithmetic calculations.

• Nhost Functions and Nhost Run, for any computation that might need to be done for answering a query.

AI-Powered Workflows

Assistants can also leverage your custom built tools through the GraphQL API or Webhooks. Need an assistant to buy a flight ticket or send an email?

You can write a small function or Run service and ask the assistant to "buy me an airplane ticket, one way, to Bali, on the 20th of January".

Custom Tools are really powerful and only limited by your imagination as you can automate lots of useful workflows.

Assistants in Action

Here is an example of an actual session with a Flight Booking Assistant with access to multiple tools:

Session Thread

And this is an ilustration of what happened behind the scenes:

Assistant in Action

Although the tools available are from very different domains, the Assistant knows which tool to use for each query. It is important that descriptions and instructions are accurate.

Conclusion

We are just starting to see what is possible with AI and with LLMs in particular.

These are powerful tools that will have a tremendous impact on the way the world is organized across a wide range of needs and industries.

We hope that Nhost Assistants will unlock your imagination in new ways. We cannot wait to see what you will build!