Rapid Prototyping for AI-Based Applications: A Hands-on Tutorial for Connecting the Dots

Omar Alonso, Kenneth Church

Abstract: Rapid prototyping is encouraged in hackathons. Similarly, in many companies, demos and MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) play an important role in important decision. In addition to benchmarking experiments and Jupyter Notebooks, decision makers are more likely to respond positively to a proposed product if they can see a demo, and even better, a (barely) working prototype. This tutorial will show how to connect the dots between APIs for AI techniques including IR, NLP, Bots and RAG, with an emphasis on throw away code. The point is not to come up with the right final solution, but rather, on rapid prototyping, using simple off-the-shelf interchangeable parts that can be combined with one another in natural ways. We will work through a few practical examples such as connecting recommendation engines to RAG systems to compare and contrast recommendations with comparable documents.