LangChain: a model call becomes a link, not an answer
On 25 October 2022 the first release of LangChain appeared, a library for building applications out of language models by composition. Its own summary: "Building applications with LLMs through composability".
Why it matters
The first widely used framework to treat a call to a model not as the final answer but as a step that can be joined to other steps, to memory and to outside tools. Much of the vocabulary the field now uses for chains and agents came from here.
The repository was created on 17 October 2022 and the first package was uploaded eight days later. The chronology is worth noting: this is five weeks before ChatGPT, which arrived on 30 November 2022. A framework for composing chains of model calls existed before the event that made such calls ordinary. Confidence is medium: both sources are a package index and a repository. They fix the date and the self-description exactly, but neither is a document explaining the intent and neither is evidence of influence. The claim about the field's vocabulary is editorial.