Humans process knowledge, simultaneously across multiple modes of data inputs. The way we learn, our experiences are all multimodal. We don't have just vision, just audio and just text.

These foundational principles of learning were articulated by the father of modern education John Amos Comenius, in his work, "Orbis Sensualium Pictus", dating back to 1658.

"All things that are naturally connected ought to be taught in combination"

Contrary to those principles, in the past, our approach to Machine Learning was often focused on specialised models tailored to process a single modality. For…

UPDATE: As of March 13, 2024, Mistral AI has integrated support for parallel function calling into their large model, a feature that was absent at the time of this blog's initial publication.

Mistral AI, a leading developer of open-source large language models, unveiled the addition of Function Calling support to its cutting-edge models.

Function Calling is a feature that facilitates the integration of LLM with external tools and APIs. It enables the language model to request the execution of client-side functions, allowing it to access necessary run-time information or perform tasks…

What is the Spring Cloud Function?

Spring Cloud Function is a SpringBoot-based framework allowing users to concentrate on their business logic by implementing them as Java Functions (i.e., Supplier, Function, Consumer). In turn the framework provides necessary abstraction to enable execution of these functions in various environments (e.g., REST, Streaming) as well as serverless environments such as AWS Lambda or Azure Functions, without having to worry about the underlying platform-specific details. This allows developers to focus on writing their business logic and let the framework handle…

This article is part of a blog series that explores the newly redesigned Spring Cloud Stream applications based on Java Functions.

Here are all the previous parts of this blog series.

• Introducing Function Based Streaming Applications

• Function Composition with Streaming Applications

• How to Build a Supplier and Source Application

• How to Build a Consumer and Sink Application

• Build and Run a Simple Stream Application

• Case Study: HTTP Request Function and Processor

• Case Study: File Source and MongoDB Sink

• Case Study: Relational Database Source and File Sink

• Case Study: Remote File Ingest with Spring Cloud Data Flow

• Case Study: Aggregator Function and Processor

• Case Study: Elasticsearch sink

…