Leveraging Gen AI
Have you ever called an LLM from somewhere other than its chat window? I motivated my talk with that question at my Ethiopian community gathering in Wageningen, Netherlands, and most of the talk is my answer to it.
Most of us use LLMs daily but still carry the impression of the ChatGPT of November 2022, when they hallucinated a ton, knew nothing past their training cutoff, and came in one flavor from one provider. A lot has changed since then. Models are generally better, and the playing field has gotten crowded with providers and options, closed-source or otherwise: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Mistral, Alibaba, DeepSeek, and the open-weight models you can run yourself with Ollama or LM Studio.
My objective was to show the community (WUR staff, postdocs, and PhD candidates, plus our kids and other family members) that we can go beyond the chat window and put these models to productive use, and to stress calling them programmatically.
You can customize them by adding context: system instructions, tool use, and MCP, use them for data extraction (RAG). I use them to fix my writing and to draft cover letters. A system prompt: “act as a career coach, say upfront when I’m not a good fit for the job, and avoid clichés and flashy words”.
I showed two demos about using LLMs for data extraction from unstructured data.
The first extracts (OCRs) the numbers from a photograph of a blackboard chalked in Mettu in 1972, showing some data points about Ethiopia. I asked for valid CSV in tidy long format and read the result straight into R with read.csv.
The second asks for structured output. I gave the Gemini API a responseSchema and an Amharic rental listing, and got back JSON object with the requested fields, even from the transliterated text.
I ended the talk with questions to the audience. What are your use cases? Will this take our jobs? What role does it play in economic development back home? Is Ethiopia lagging behind wrt AI usage and literacy?
At that time, July 13, 2025, Ethiopia was not on Anthropic’s list of supported countries.
Slides: Leveraging Gen AI, source on GitHub.
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