Visualising AI Embeddings in APEX

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" To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it."     - Geoffrey Hinton , 2018 Turing Award winner. Within the wonderful world of  Generative AI , one concept that is all the rage is RAG, or  Retrieval Augmented Generation , which is an  AI framework that combines the strengths of traditional information retrieval systems (such as databases) with the capabilities of generative large language models (LLM s) . RAG's goal is to improve the accuracy, relevance, and timeliness of information  generation  - such as  documents, text and images -  by optimizing LLM output.  When creating a RAG system, it’s essential to store information in a format that a LLM can retrieve. This is where  data is converted into embeddings through a pro...
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Eventually......

Well just 3 years after creating an account on Blogger I am writing my first post. This of course is at a time when, we are told, blogging is dying (or should actually be dead now according to this Wired article from a little while back).

So, with this in mind, it means I will likely start some serious twittering in around another 2-3 years, long after the twitter dust has settled. I had come here armed with an arsenal of excuses, but to hell with those, I'm just going to get on with it.

You see, I'm coming to the end of a long'ish contract where again my APEX skills were called upon once again and, after it finishes, will probably spend some time building an online shop for my wifes business which supplies jewellery to other businesses, but wants to sell direct to consumers. I say 'probably' as what usually happens when I make plans in this way is that a nice little contract comes along which I start as the other finishes.

Assuming for now that this plan does happen, then I need to consider how I am going to go about this. As its an established business that I would be developing for, then we want something more than the usual limited template driven options available from some of the hosting companies. So, I had already started looking at other options, you know, the usual suspects - osCommerce, Zen Cart, Actinic, Avactis, etc, some of them highly configurable but most over complicated for what we need.

Then I got thinking, why not utilise the skills I have and create the online shop using Oracle and APEX. This makes complete sense. APEX is perfect for this - its sits in the DB so benefits from all the security that offers (I know, I know, there are security issues but I have that covered), there's enough hosting companies out there now, and with APEX version 4 I can take advantage of many new features (ie auto comlete text boxes, dynamic actions, jQuery, plus hopefully a whole raft of third party plugins that will be available). Plus, of course the Oracle Store is APEX based (though I suspect the development budget for that is a teeny bit more than we have).

So, that is where I am at the moment. I've taken a look at the Online Store packaged application and may use this as a starting point, but I'm interested in other peoples experience of doing a similar thing with Apex. Good or bad, any comment is appreciated, and I shall keep you posted with my progress.

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