A Practical Guide to Using Vercel AI SDK in Next.js Apps
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This article provides a step-by-step guide on integrating the Vercel AI SDK in Next.js applications. It touches on the various concepts, components, and supported providers. To illustrate these concepts, we’ll create a simple demo application using the SDK.
The Significance of Artificial Intelligence in 2024
It is the year 2024, and artificial intelligence is undeniably a big deal. We have seen its application across various scopes, from intelligent assistants to self-driving cars. AI is rapidly transforming the way we live and interact with technology.
In the web development field, Vercel, a major player, has made great efforts toward becoming a TypeScript framework for AI applications and, as a result, introduced the Vercel AI SDK.
The Vercel AI SDK abstracts the complexities and simplifies the process of building AI-powered applications with various frameworks like React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and more. It offers a unified API for AI providers like Google, Open AI, Mistral, and Anthropic. It also supports streaming, generative UI, and other advanced capabilities.
Understanding AI Models
Before we discuss the Vercel AI SDK, let’s briefly look at some of the fundamental concepts we should be aware of.
AI models are programs that undergo training using large datasets to identify patterns and make decisions independently without human intervention. Based on the acquired knowledge, they can then make predictions on new and unseen data.
Some common examples of AI models include image recognition models, recommender systems, and natural language processing models, among others.
Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of the data they were trained with and then they can generate new data with similar characteristics.
A large language model (LLM) is a subset of generative models focusing primarily on text. It is trained on large amounts of text data, allowing it to understand and generate text responses in impressive ways.
Prompts and Streaming in AI
A prompt is an instruction provided to an LLM that instructs it on what to do—the inputs that trigger the model to generate text. The more precise and detailed the instructions are, the better the LLM can understand a request and generate the desired output.
LLMs can take some time to generate responses, depending on the model and the prompt given. In interactive use cases where users want instant responses, streaming can significantly improve user experience compared to the non-streaming approach.
The Components of Vercel AI SDK
The Vercel AI SDK is a comprehensive toolkit for building AI applications. It simplifies the integration of AI into modern web applications and offers many advantages:
The SDK is divided into three main parts: AI SDK Core, AI SDK UI, and AI SDK RSC. Let's take a closer look at each of these components:
AI SDK Core
The Vercel AI SDK Core provides a standardized approach to integrating interactions with LLMs in modern web applications.
Vercel AI SDK Core simplifies the process of switching between providers and makes integrating LLMs easy by offering a single way of interfacing with the LLMs from the supported providers through a Language Model Specification.
This tool offers core functions to work with LLMs in any JavaScript environment.
AI SDK UI
The AI SDK UI simplifies the process of building interactive applications like chat applications, handling complex tasks like state management, parsing and streaming data, data persistence, and more.
AI SDK RSC
The AI SDK RSC extends the SDK’s power beyond plain text, providing LLMs with rich, component-based interfaces using the React Server components approach employed in Next.js.
The SDK provides great support for several LLMs from various providers.
Creating a Demo Application with Vercel AI SDK
The Vercel AI SDK provides functions like generateObject and streamObject to make it easier to work with AI models and structured data.
The SDK also simplifies the creation of interactive experiences, like building a basic chat application.
Follow the steps and code examples as outlined in this article to start using the Vercel AI SDK in your Next.js applications.
