Databricks-Generative-AI-Engineer-Associate Databricks Certified Generative AI Engineer Associate Questions and Answers

Problem Context: The Generative AI Engineer needs a tool to build amulti-step LLM-based workflow. This type of workflow often involves chaining multiple steps together, such as query generation, retrieval of information, response generation, and post-processing, with LLMs integrated at several points.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Pandas: Pandas is a powerful data manipulation library for structured data analysis, but it is not designed for managing or orchestrating multi-step workflows, especially those involving LLMs.

Option B: TensorFlow: TensorFlow is primarily used for training and deploying machine learning models, especially deep learning models. It is not designed for orchestrating multi-step tasks in LLM-based workflows.

Option C: PySpark: PySpark is a distributed computing framework used for large-scale data processing. While useful for handling big data, it is not specialized for chaining LLM-based operations.

Option D: LangChain: LangChain is a purpose-built framework designed specifically fororchestrating multi-step workflowswith large language models (LLMs). It enables developers to easily chain different tasks, such as retrieving documents, summarizing information, and generating responses, all in a structured flow. This makes it the best tool for building complex LLM-based workflows.

Thus,LangChainis the most suitable library for creating multi-step LLM-based workflows.

To design an LLM-based application that can answer employee HR questions using HR PDF documentation, the most effective approach is option D. Here's why:

Chunking and Vector Store Embedding:HR documentation tends to be lengthy, so splitting it into smaller, manageable chunks helps optimize retrieval. These chunks are then embedded into avector store(a database that stores vector representations of text). Each chunk of text is transformed into anembeddingusing a transformer-based model, which allows for efficient similarity-based retrieval.

Using Vector Search for Retrieval:When an employee asks a question, the system converts their query into an embedding as well. This embedding is then compared with the embeddings of the document chunks in the vector store. The most semantically similar chunks are retrieved, which ensures that the answer is based on the most relevant parts of the documentation.

LLM to Generate a Response:Once the relevant chunks are retrieved, these chunks are passed into the LLM, which uses them as context to generate a coherent and accurate response to the employee's question.

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

A (Calculate Averaged Embeddings): Averaging embeddings might dilute important information. It doesn't provide enough granularity to focus on specific sections of documents.

B (Summarize HR Documentation): Summarization loses the detail necessary for HR-related queries, which are often specific. It would likely miss the mark for more detailed inquiries.

C (Interaction Matrix and ALS): This approach is better suited for recommendation systems and not for HR queries, as it’s focused on collaborative filtering rather than text-based retrieval.

Thus, option D is the most effective solution for providing precise and contextual answers based on HR documentation.

For a small, cost-conscious startup in the cancer research field, choosing a domain-specific and smaller LLM is the most effective strategy. Here's whyBis the best choice:

Domain-specific performance: A smaller LLM that has been fine-tuned for the domain of cancer research will outperform a general-purpose LLM for specialized queries. This ensures high-quality responses without needing to rely on a large, expensive LLM.

Cost-efficiency: Smaller models are cheaper to run, both in terms of compute resources and API usage costs. A domain-specific smaller LLM can deliver good quality responses without the need for the extensive computational power required by larger models.

Focused knowledge: In a specialized field like cancer research, having an LLM tailored to the subject matter provides better relevance and accuracy for queries, while keeping costs low. Large, general-purpose LLMs may provide irrelevant information, leading to inefficiency and higher costs.

This approach allows the startup to balance quality, cost, and customer satisfaction effectively, making it the most suitable strategy.

Building a basic LLM-enabled chat application with conversational capabilities, knowledge retrieval, and contextual memory requires specific components that work together to process queries, maintain context, and retrieve relevant information. Databricks’ Generative AI Engineer documentation outlines key components for such systems, particularly in the context of frameworks like LangChain or Databricks’ MosaicML integrations. Let’s evaluate the required components:

Understanding the Requirements:

Conversational capabilities: The app must generate natural, coherent responses.

Knowledge retrieval: It must access external or domain-specific knowledge.

Contextual memory: It must remember prior interactions in the conversation.

Databricks Reference:"A typical LLM chat application includes a memory component to track conversation history and a retrieval mechanism to incorporate external knowledge"("Databricks Generative AI Cookbook," 2023).

Evaluating the Options:

A. (Q): This appears incomplete or unclear (possibly a typo). Without further context, it’s not a valid component.

B. Vector Stores: These store embeddings of documents or knowledge bases, enabling semantic search and retrieval of relevant information for the LLM. This is critical for knowledge retrieval in a chat application.

Databricks Reference:"Vector stores, such as those integrated with Databricks’ Lakehouse, enable efficient retrieval of contextual data for LLMs"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

C. Conversation Buffer Memory: This component stores the conversation history, allowing the LLM to maintain context across multiple turns. It’s essential for contextual memory.

Databricks Reference:"Conversation Buffer Memory tracks prior user inputs and LLM outputs, ensuring context-aware responses"("Generative AI Engineer Guide").

D. External tools: These (e.g., APIs or calculators) enhance functionality but aren’t required for abasicchat app with the specified capabilities.

E. Chat loaders: These might refer to data loaders for chat logs, but they’re not a core chain component for conversational functionality or memory.

F. React Components: These relate to front-end UI development, not the LLM chain’s backend functionality.

Selecting the Two Required Components:

Forknowledge retrieval, Vector Stores (B) are necessary to fetch relevant external data, a cornerstone of Databricks’ RAG-based chat systems.

Forcontextual memory, Conversation Buffer Memory (C) is required to maintain conversation history, ensuring coherent and context-aware responses.

While an LLM itself is implied as the core generator, the question asks for chain components beyond the model, making B and C the minimal yet sufficient pair for a basic application.

Conclusion: The two required chain components areB. Vector StoresandC. Conversation Buffer Memory, as they directly address knowledge retrieval and contextual memory, respectively, aligning with Databricks’ documented best practices for LLM-enabled chat applications.

Problem Context: The engineer needs an open-source LLM with a large context window to develop an application.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: DistilBERT: While an efficient and smaller version of BERT, DistilBERT does not provide a particularly large context window.

Option B: MPT-30B: This model, while large, is not specified as being particularly notable for its context window capabilities.

Option C: Llama2-70B: Known for its large model size and extensive capabilities, including a large context window. It is also available as an open-source model, making it ideal for applications requiring extensive contextual understanding.

Option D: DBRX: This is not a recognized standard model in the context of large language models with extensive context windows.

Thus,Option C(Llama2-70B) is the best fit as it meets the criteria of having a large context window and being available for open-source use, suitable for developing robust language understanding applications.

Problem Context: After switching to a model with a shorter context length, the error message indicating that the prompt token count has exceeded the limit suggests that the input to the model is too large.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Use a smaller embedding model to generate– This wouldn't necessarily address the issue of prompt size exceeding the model’s token limit.

Option B: Reduce the maximum output tokens of the new model– This option affects the output length, not the size of the input being too large.

Option C: Decrease the chunk size of embedded documents– This would help reduce the size of each document chunk fed into the model, ensuring that the input remains within the model's context length limitations.

Option D: Reduce the number of records retrieved from the vector database– By retrieving fewer records, the total input size to the model can be managed more effectively, keeping it within the allowable token limits.

Option E: Retrain the response generating model using ALiBi– Retraining the model is contrary to the stipulation not to change the response generating model.

OptionsCandDare the most effective solutions to manage the model’s shorter context length without changing the model itself, by adjusting the input size both in terms of individual document size and total documents retrieved.

The Generative AI Engineer needs to follow a methodical pipeline to build and deploy a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application. The steps outlined in optionBaccurately reflect this process:

Ingest documents from a source: This is the first step, where the engineer collects documents (e.g., technical regulations) that will be used for retrieval when the application answers user questions.

Index the documents and save to Vector Search: Once the documents are ingested, they need to be embedded using a technique like embeddings (e.g., with a pre-trained model like BERT) and stored in a vector database (such as Pinecone or FAISS). This enables fast retrieval based on user queries.

User submits queries against an LLM: Users interact with the application by submitting their queries. These queries will be passed to the LLM.

LLM retrieves relevant documents: The LLM works with the vector store to retrieve the most relevant documents based on their vector representations.

LLM generates a response: Using the retrieved documents, the LLM generates a response that is tailored to the user's question.

Evaluate model: After generating responses, the system must be evaluated to ensure the retrieved documents are relevant and the generated response is accurate. Metrics such as accuracy, relevance, and user satisfaction can be used for evaluation.

Deploy it using Model Serving: Once the RAG pipeline is ready and evaluated, it is deployed using a model-serving platform such as Databricks Model Serving. This enables real-time inference and response generation for users.

By following these steps, the Generative AI Engineer ensures that the RAG application is both efficient and effective for the task of answering technical regulation questions.

In the context of ensuring that outputs are relevant to financial news, increasing compute power (option B) does not directly improve therelevanceof the LLM-generated outputs. Here’s why:

Compute Power and Relevancy:Increasing compute power can help the model process inputs faster, but it does not inherently improve therelevanceof the answers. Relevancy depends on the data sources, the retrieval method, and the filtering mechanisms in place, not on how quickly the model processes the query.

What Actually Helps with Relevance:Other methods, like content filtering, guardrails, or manual review, can directly impact the relevance of the model’s responses by ensuring the model focuses on pertinent financial content. These methods help tailor the LLM’s responses to the financial domain and avoid irrelevant or harmful outputs.

Why Other Options Are More Relevant:

A (Comprehensive Guardrail Framework): This will ensure that the model avoids generating content that is irrelevant or inappropriate in the finance sector.

C (Profanity Filter): While not directly related to financial relevancy, ensuring the output is clean and professional is still important in maintaining the quality of responses.

D (Manual Review): Incorporating human oversight to catch and correct issues with the LLM’s output ensures the final answers are aligned with financial content expectations.

Thus, increasing compute power does not help with ensuring the outputs are more relevant to financial news, making option B the correct answer.

When deploying an LLM application for customer service inquiries, the primary focus is on measuring the operational efficiency and quality of the responses. Here's whyAis the correct metric:

Number of customer inquiries processed per unit of time: This metric tracks the throughput of the customer service system, reflecting how many customer inquiries the LLM application can handle in a given time period (e.g., per minute or hour). High throughput is crucial in customer service applications where quick response times are essential to user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Real-time performance monitoring: Monitoring the number of queries processed is an important part of ensuring that the model is performing well under load, especially during peak traffic times. It also helps ensure the system scales properly to meet demand.

Why other options are not ideal:

B. Energy usage per query: While energy efficiency is a consideration, it is not the primary concern for a customer-facing application where user experience (i.e., fast and accurate responses) is critical.

C. Final perplexity scores for the training of the model: Perplexity is a metric for model training, but it doesn't reflect the real-time operational performance of an LLM in production.

D. HuggingFace Leaderboard values for the base LLM: The HuggingFace Leaderboard is more relevant during model selection and benchmarking. However, it is not a direct measure of the model's performance in a specific customer service application in production.

Focusing on throughput (inquiries processed per unit time) ensures that the LLM application is meeting business needs for fast and efficient customer service responses.

The task at hand is to improve the LLM’s ability to generate poem-like article summaries with the desired tone and style. Using aneutralizerto normalize the tone and style of the underlying documents (option B) will not help improve the LLM’s ability to generate the desired poetic style. Here’s why:

Neutralizing Underlying Documents:A neutralizer aims to reduce or standardize the tone of input data. However, this contradicts the goal, which is to generate text with aspecific tone and style(like haikus). Neutralizing the source documents will strip away the richness of the content, making it harder for the LLM to generate creative, stylistic outputs like poems.

Why Other Options Improve Results:

A (Explicit Instructions in the Prompt): Directly instructing the LLM to generate text in a specific tone and style helps align the output with the desired format (e.g., haikus). This is a common and effective technique in prompt engineering.

C (Few-shot Examples): Providing examples of the desired output format helps the LLM understand the expected tone and structure, making it easier to generate similar outputs.

D (Fine-tuning the LLM): Fine-tuning the model on a dataset that contains examples of the desired tone and style is a powerful way to improve the model’s ability to generate outputs that match the target format.

Therefore, using a neutralizer (option B) isnotan effective method for achieving the goal of generating stylized poetic summaries.

Problem Context: The Generative AI Engineer needs a prompt that will enable an LLM trained on customer call transcripts to classify and respond correctly regarding product availability. The desired response should clearly indicate whether a product is "In Stock" or "Out of Stock," and it should be formatted in a way that is structured and easy to parse programmatically, such as JSON.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: Respond with “In Stock” if the customer asks for a product. This prompt is too generic and does not specify how to handle the case when a product is not available, nor does it provide a structured output format.

Option B: This option is correctly formatted and explicit. It instructs the LLM to respond based on the availability mentioned in the customer call transcript and to format the response in JSON. This structure allows for easy integration into systems that may need to process this information automatically, such as customer service dashboards or databases.

Option C: Respond with “Out of Stock” if the customer asks for a product. Like option A, this prompt is also insufficient as it only covers the scenario where a product is unavailable and does not provide a structured output.

Option D: While this prompt correctly specifies how to respond based on product availability, it lacks the structured output format, making it less suitable for systems that require formatted data for further processing.

Given the requirements for clear, programmatically usable outputs,Option Bis the optimal choice because it provides precise instructions on how to respond and includes a JSON format example for structuring the output, which is ideal for automated systems or further data handling.

The task requires an open generative AI model for a transcription (speech-to-text) task where speed is essential. Let’s assess the options based on their suitability for transcription and performance characteristics, referencing Databricks’ approach to model selection.

Option A: Llama-2-70b-chat-hf

Llama-2 is a text-based LLM optimized for chat and text generation, not speech-to-text. It lacks transcription capabilities.

Databricks Reference:"Llama models are designed for natural language generation, not audio processing"("Databricks Model Catalog").

Option B: MPT-30B-Instruct

MPT-30B is another text-based LLM focused on instruction-following and text generation, not transcription. It’s irrelevant for speech-to-text tasks.

Databricks Reference: No specific mention, but MPT is categorized under text LLMs in Databricks’ ecosystem, not audio models.

Option C: DBRX

DBRX, developed by Databricks, is a powerful text-based LLM for general-purpose generation. It doesn’t natively support speech-to-text and isn’t optimized for transcription.

Databricks Reference:"DBRX excels at text generation and reasoning tasks"("Introducing DBRX," 2023)—no mention of audio capabilities.

Option D: whisper-large-v3 (1.6B)

Whisper, developed by OpenAI, is an open-source model specifically designed for speech-to-text transcription. The “large-v3” variant (1.6 billion parameters) balances accuracy and efficiency, with optimizations for speed via quantization or deployment on GPUs—key for the application’s requirements.

Databricks Reference:"For audio transcription, models like Whisper are recommended for their speed and accuracy"("Generative AI Cookbook," 2023). Databricks supports Whisper integration in its MLflow or Lakehouse workflows.

Conclusion: OnlyD. whisper-large-v3is a speech-to-text model, making it the sole suitable choice. Its design prioritizes transcription, and its efficiency (e.g., via optimized inference) meets the speed requirement, aligning with Databricks’ model deployment best practices.

In this scenario, the Generative AI Engineer needs to design a system that can handle different types of queries about the monster truck team. The queries may involve text-based information, API lookups for event dates, or table queries for standings. The best solution is to implement atool-based agent system.

Here’s how option B works, and why it’s the most appropriate answer:

System Design Using Agent-Based Model:In modern agent-based LLM systems, you can design a system where the LLM (Large Language Model) acts as a central orchestrator. The model can "decide" which tools to use based on the query. These tools can include API calls, table lookups, or natural language searches. The system should contain asystem promptthat informs the LLM about the available tools.

System Prompt Listing Tools:By creating a well-craftedsystem prompt, the LLM knows which tools are at its disposal. For instance, one tool may query an external API for event dates, another might look up standings in a database, and a third may involve searching a vector database for general text-based information. Theagentwill be responsible for calling the appropriate tool depending on the query.

Agent Orchestration of Calls:The agent system is designed to execute a series of steps based on the incoming query. If a user asks for the next event date, the system will recognize this as a task that requires an API call. If the user asks about standings, the agent might query the appropriate table in the database. For text-based questions, it may call a search function over ingested data. The agent orchestrates this entire process, ensuring the LLM makes calls to the right resources dynamically.

Generative AI Tools and Context:This is a standard architecture for integrating multiple functionalities into a system where each query requires different actions. The core design in option B is efficient because it keeps the system modular and dynamic by leveraging tools rather than overloading the LLM with static information in a system prompt (like option D).

Why Other Options Are Less Suitable:

A (RAG Architecture): While relevant, simply ingesting PDFs into a vector store only helps with text-based retrieval. It wouldn’t help with API lookups or table queries.

C (Conditional Logic with RAG/API/TABLE): Although this approach works, it relies heavily on manual text parsing and might introduce complexity when scaling the system.

D (System Prompt with Event Dates and Standings): Hardcoding dates and table information into a system prompt isn’t scalable. As the standings or events change, the system would need constant updating, making it inefficient.

By bundling multiple tools into a single agent-based system (as in option B), the Generative AI Engineer can best handle the diverse requirements of this system.

Problem Context: The goal is to deploy a trained LLM on Databricks in the simplest and most integrated manner.

Explanation of Options:

Option A: This method involves unnecessary steps like logging the model as a pickle object, which is not the most efficient path in a Databricks environment.

Option B: Logging the model with MLflow during training and then using MLflow’s API to register and start serving the model is straightforward and leverages Databricks’ built-in functionalities for seamless model deployment.

Option C: Building and running a Docker container is a complex and less integrated approach within the Databricks ecosystem.

Option D: Using Flask and Gunicorn is a more manual approach and less integrated compared to the native capabilities of Databricks and MLflow.

OptionBprovides the most straightforward and efficient process, utilizing Databricks’ ecosystem to its full advantage for deploying models.

The task is to prevent toxic or unsafe responses in an LLM system using the Foundation Model API with minimal effort. Let’s assess the options.

Option A: Host Llama Guard on Foundation Model API and use it to detect unsafe responses

Llama Guard is a safety-focused model designed to detect toxic or unsafe content. Hosting it via the Foundation Model API (a Databricks service) integrates seamlessly with the existing system, requiring minimal setup (just deployment and a check step), and leverages provisioned throughput for performance.

Databricks Reference:"Foundation Model API supports hosting safety models like Llama Guard to filter outputs efficiently"("Foundation Model API Documentation," 2023).

Option B: Add some LLM calls to their chain to detect unsafe content before returning text

Using additional LLM calls (e.g., prompting an LLM to classify toxicity) increases latency, complexity, and effort (crafting prompts, chaining logic), and lacks the specificity of a dedicated safety model.

Databricks Reference:"Ad-hoc LLM checks are less efficient than purpose-built safety solutions"("Building LLM Applications with Databricks").

Option C: Add a regex expression on inputs and outputs to detect unsafe responses

Regex can catch simple patterns (e.g., profanity) but fails for nuanced toxicity (e.g., sarcasm, context-dependent harm), requiring significant manual effort to maintain and update rules.

Databricks Reference:"Regex-based filtering is limited for complex safety needs"("Generative AI Cookbook").

Option D: Ask users to report unsafe responses

User reporting is reactive, not preventive, and places burden on users rather than the system. It doesn’t limit unsafe outputs proactively and requires additional effort for feedback handling.

Databricks Reference:"Proactive guardrails are preferred over user-driven monitoring"("Databricks Generative AI Engineer Guide").

Conclusion: Option A (Llama Guard on Foundation Model API) is the least-effort, most effective approach, leveraging Databricks’ infrastructure for seamless safety integration.