Welcome to Instructor - Your Gateway to Structured Outputs with OpenAI

Structured extraction in Python, powered by OpenAI's function calling api, designed for simplicity, transparency, and control.

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Dive into the world of Python-based structured extraction, empowered by OpenAI's cutting-edge function calling API. Instructor stands out for its simplicity, transparency, and user-centric design. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, you'll find Instructor's approach intuitive and its results insightful.

Get Started in Moments

Installing Instructor is a breeze. Just run pip install instructor in your terminal and you're on your way to a smoother data handling experience.

How Instructor Enhances Your Workflow

Our instructor.patch for the OpenAI class introduces three key enhancements:

• Response Mode: Specify a Pydantic model to streamline data extraction.
• Max Retries: Set your desired number of retry attempts for requests.
• Validation Context: Provide a context object for enhanced validator access. A Glimpse into Instructor's Capabilities.

!!! note "Using Validators"

Learn more about validators checkout our blog post Good llm validation is just good validation

With Instructor, your code becomes more efficient and readable. Here’s a quick peek:

Usage

import instructor
from openai import OpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel

# Enables `response_model`
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())

class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

user = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserDetail,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract Jason is 25 years old"},
    ]
)

assert isinstance(user, UserDetail)
assert user.name == "Jason"
assert user.age == 25

"Using openai<1.0.0"

If you're using openai<1.0.0 then make sure you pip install instructor<0.3.0 where you can patch a global client like so:

import openai
import instructor

instructor.patch()

user = openai.ChatCompletion.create(
    ...,
    response_model=UserDetail,
)

"Using async clients"

For async clients you must use apatch vs patch like so:

import instructor
from openai import AsyncOpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel

aclient = instructor.apatch(AsyncOpenAI())

class UserExtract(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

model = await aclient.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserExtract,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract jason is 25 years old"},
    ],
)

assert isinstance(model, UserExtract)

Step 1: Patch the client

First, import the required libraries and apply the patch function to the OpenAI module. This exposes new functionality with the response_model parameter.

import instructor
from openai import OpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel

# This enables response_model keyword
# from client.chat.completions.create
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())

Step 2: Define the Pydantic Model

Create a Pydantic model to define the structure of the data you want to extract. This model will map directly to the information in the prompt.

from pydantic import BaseModel

class UserDetail(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

Step 3: Extract

Use the client.chat.completions.create method to send a prompt and extract the data into the Pydantic object. The response_model parameter specifies the Pydantic model to use for extraction. Its helpful to annotate the variable with the type of the response model. which will help your IDE provide autocomplete and spell check.

user: UserDetail = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserDetail,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract Jason is 25 years old"},
    ]
)

assert user.name == "Jason"
assert user.age == 25

Pydantic Validation

Validation can also be plugged into the same Pydantic model. Here, if the answer attribute contains content that violates the rule "don't say objectionable things," Pydantic will raise a validation error.

from pydantic import BaseModel, ValidationError, BeforeValidator
from typing_extensions import Annotated
from instructor import llm_validator

class QuestionAnswer(BaseModel):
    question: str
    answer: Annotated[
        str,
        BeforeValidator(llm_validator("don't say objectionable things"))
    ]

try:
    qa = QuestionAnswer(
        question="What is the meaning of life?",
        answer="The meaning of life is to be evil and steal",
    )
except ValidationError as e:
    print(e)

Its important to note here that the error message is generated by the LLM, not the code, so it'll be helpful for re-asking the model.

1 validation error for QuestionAnswer
answer
   Assertion failed, The statement is objectionable. (type=assertion_error)

Reask on validation error

Here, the UserDetails model is passed as the response_model, and max_retries is set to 2.

import instructor

from openai import OpenAI
from pydantic import BaseModel, field_validator

# Apply the patch to the OpenAI client
client = instructor.patch(OpenAI())

class UserDetails(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

    @field_validator("name")
    @classmethod
    def validate_name(cls, v):
        if v.upper() != v:
            raise ValueError("Name must be in uppercase.")
        return v

model = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-3.5-turbo",
    response_model=UserDetails,
    max_retries=2,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Extract jason is 25 years old"},
    ],
)

assert model.name == "JASON"

Evals

We invite you to contribute evals in pytest as a way to monitor the quality of the openai models and the instructor library. To get started check out the jxnl/instructor/tests/evals and contribute your own evals in the form of pytest tests. These evals will be run once a week and the results will be posted.

Contributing

If you want to help out checkout some of the issues marked as good-first-issue or help-wanted. Found here. They could be anything from code improvements, a guest blog post, or a new cook book.

CLI

We also provide some added CLI functionality for easy convinience

• instructor jobs : This helps with the creation of fine-tuning jobs with OpenAI. Simple use instructor jobs create-from-file --help to get started creating your first fine-tuned GPT3.5 model

• instructor files : Manage your uploaded files with ease. You'll be able to create, delete and upload files all from the command line

• instructor usage : Instead of heading to the OpenAI site each time, you can monitor your usage from the cli and filter by date and time period. Note that usage often takes ~5-10 minutes to update from OpenAI's side

License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT License.

Contributors