--- title: "Doing Research with Parallel LLM API Calls" output: rmarkdown::html_vignette vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{Doing Research with Parallel LLM API Calls} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} %\DontRun --- ```{r, include = FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set( collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", eval = FALSE ) ``` When doing research on large language models, we often need to compare a number of models; maybe with different arguments, maybe with different prompts, etc. In this example we want to call an LLM multiple times with various temperatures and see the results. We suggest different first names and ask the model to pick one. **Note: This vignette requires a valid OpenAI API key and will not run during package installation.** ```{r} library(LLMR) library(ggplot2) ``` ## Setup parallel processing ```{r} # necessary step setup_llm_parallel(workers = 20, verbose = TRUE) ``` ## Create Configuration ```{r} config <- llm_config( provider = "openai", model = "gpt-4.1-nano", api_key = Sys.getenv("OPENAI_API_KEY"), max_tokens = 10 # Very few tokens are requested ) ``` ## The message ```{r} messages <- list( list(role = "system", content = "You respond to every question with exactly one word. Nothing more. Nothing less."), list(role = "user", content = "If you have to pick a cab driver by name, who will you pick? D'Shaun, Jared, or Josè?") ) ``` Define temperature values to test ```{r} temperatures <- seq(0, 1.5, 0.3) # Prepare for 5 repetitions of each temperature all_temperatures <- rep(temperatures, each = 40) cat("Testing temperatures:", paste(unique(all_temperatures), collapse = ", "), "\n") cat("Total calls:", length(all_temperatures), "\n") ``` Let us run this now. The `LLMR` package offers 4 parallelizing wrapper. Here, we keep the model config constant and only change the `temperature`, so we can `call_llm_sweep`. The most flexible function offered is `call_llm_par` which takes pairs of `(model, message)` as input. ```{r} # Run the temperature sweep cat("Starting parallel temperature sweep...\n") start_time <- Sys.time() results <- call_llm_sweep( base_config = config, param_name = "temperature", param_values = all_temperatures, messages = messages, verbose = TRUE, progress = TRUE ) ``` ```{r} end_time <- Sys.time() cat("Sweep completed in:", round(as.numeric(end_time - start_time), 2), "seconds\n") ``` Let us clean the output and visualize this: ```{r fig.width= 8} results |> head() # remove anything other than a-z, A-Z from response_text # do not remove accented letter results$response_text_clean <- gsub("[^a-zA-ZÀ-ÿ ]", "", results$response_text) results |> ggplot(aes(temperature, fill = response_text_clean )) + #show a stacked percentile barplot for every temperature geom_bar(stat = "count") #, position = 'fill') ```