What is Langchain? Explained in Everyday Langauge for AI Beginners

If you have been following this AI for Absolute Beginners series, familiarizing yourself with concepts from RAG and vector databases to fine-tuning, you’ve likely encountered this term: LangChain — and wondered, what exactly is LangChain?

For most people who have never built any LLM-related applications, understanding LangChain isn’t usually necessary — because, for many consumer-facing LLMs or AI interfaces, users interact more with prompting than with the underlying mechanism. LangChain is a developer-facing concept that a consumer can hardly feel it ever exists.

I know, “concept” is still vague — so let’s talk about the specifics.

First of all, Langchain is a website, a company, a platform, and a framework — And we are talking about the framework.

LangChain the startup

LangChain on Github

In October 2022, LangChain started as an open-source project created by Harrison Chase. In April…