Six demos that help you get started with LLM AI development in .NET

AI is a hot topic in the tech world. Since the introduction of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular. Many developers are interested in learning how to build AI applications, or how to integrate AI into their existing applications. However, many code examples are written in Python, which can be a barrier for .NET developers. The good thing is that it doesn’t matter what language you use to talk to the LLM models, as long as you understand how to send the right data to the model and interpret the results. In this article, I will show you six demos, written in C#, that will help you get started with LLM AI development in .NET. We will cover the following topics:

• How to communicate with the LLM model
• How to use Semantic Kernel to call native functions
• How to enable the LLM model to search for information
• How to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the LLM model
• How to use agents to solve complex tasks

After reading this article, you will have a basic understanding of how to use LLM models in .NET, and get some inspiration for your own projects.

You can find the code for these demos on my GitHub repository: https://github.com/yanxiaodi/MyCodeSamples/LlmDemos. Let’s get started!

Pre-requisites

Before we start, we need to understand some basic concepts. You must have the experience of using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is powered by OpenAI’s LLM models. OpenAI provides a wide range of models for different tasks, such as text generation, TTS, audio recognition, image recognition, etc. Besides, there are many other LLM models available, such as Llama, Phi3, Mistral, Gemma, etc. Some of these models are open-source, and some are not. HuggingFace is a popular platform for hosting and sharing LLM models. You can find many pre-trained models on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/.

As OpenAI leads the field in LLM research, their API becomes the de facto standard for LLM development. You can find more information about the OpenAI API here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/overview. In this article, we will focus on text generation, as it is the most…