ChatXAI

This page will help you get started with xAI chat models. For detailed documentation of all ChatXAI features and configurations head to the API reference.

xAI offers an API to interact with Grok models.

Overview

Integration details

Class	Package	Local	Serializable	JS support	Package downloads	Package latest
ChatXAI	langchain-xai	❌	beta	✅

Model features

Tool calling	Structured output	JSON mode	Image input	Audio input	Video input	Token-level streaming	Native async	Token usage	Logprobs
✅	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	✅	✅

Setup

To access xAI models you'll need to create an xAI account, get an API key, and install the langchain-xai integration package.

Credentials

Head to this page to sign up for xAI and generate an API key. Once you've done this set the XAI_API_KEY environment variable:

import getpass
import os

if "XAI_API_KEY" not in os.environ:
    os.environ["XAI_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("Enter your xAI API key: ")

If you want to get automated tracing of your model calls you can also set your LangSmith API key by uncommenting below:

# os.environ["LANGSMITH_API_KEY"] = getpass.getpass("Enter your LangSmith API key: ")
# os.environ["LANGSMITH_TRACING"] = "true"

Installation

The LangChain xAI integration lives in the langchain-xai package:

%pip install -qU langchain-xai

Instantiation

Now we can instantiate our model object and generate chat completions:

from langchain_xai import ChatXAI

llm = ChatXAI(
    model="grok-beta",
    temperature=0,
    max_tokens=None,
    timeout=None,
    max_retries=2,
    # other params...
)

Invocation

messages = [
    (
        "system",
        "You are a helpful assistant that translates English to French. Translate the user sentence.",
    ),
    ("human", "I love programming."),
]
ai_msg = llm.invoke(messages)
ai_msg

AIMessage(content="J'adore programmer.", additional_kwargs={'refusal': None}, response_metadata={'token_usage': {'completion_tokens': 6, 'prompt_tokens': 30, 'total_tokens': 36, 'completion_tokens_details': None, 'prompt_tokens_details': None}, 'model_name': 'grok-beta', 'system_fingerprint': 'fp_14b89b2dfc', 'finish_reason': 'stop', 'logprobs': None}, id='run-adffb7a3-e48a-4f52-b694-340d85abe5c3-0', usage_metadata={'input_tokens': 30, 'output_tokens': 6, 'total_tokens': 36, 'input_token_details': {}, 'output_token_details': {}})

print(ai_msg.content)

J'adore programmer.

Chaining

We can chain our model with a prompt template like so:

from langchain_core.prompts import ChatPromptTemplate

prompt = ChatPromptTemplate.from_messages(
    [
        (
            "system",
            "You are a helpful assistant that translates {input_language} to {output_language}.",
        ),
        ("human", "{input}"),
    ]
)

chain = prompt | llm
chain.invoke(
    {
        "input_language": "English",
        "output_language": "German",
        "input": "I love programming.",
    }
)

API Reference:ChatPromptTemplate

AIMessage(content='Ich liebe das Programmieren.', additional_kwargs={'refusal': None}, response_metadata={'token_usage': {'completion_tokens': 7, 'prompt_tokens': 25, 'total_tokens': 32, 'completion_tokens_details': None, 'prompt_tokens_details': None}, 'model_name': 'grok-beta', 'system_fingerprint': 'fp_14b89b2dfc', 'finish_reason': 'stop', 'logprobs': None}, id='run-569fc8dc-101b-4e6d-864e-d4fa80df2b63-0', usage_metadata={'input_tokens': 25, 'output_tokens': 7, 'total_tokens': 32, 'input_token_details': {}, 'output_token_details': {}})

Tool calling

ChatXAI has a tool calling (we use "tool calling" and "function calling" interchangeably here) API that lets you describe tools and their arguments, and have the model return a JSON object with a tool to invoke and the inputs to that tool. Tool-calling is extremely useful for building tool-using chains and agents, and for getting structured outputs from models more generally.

ChatXAI.bind_tools()

With ChatXAI.bind_tools, we can easily pass in Pydantic classes, dict schemas, LangChain tools, or even functions as tools to the model. Under the hood these are converted to an OpenAI tool schemas, which looks like:

{
    "name": "...",
    "description": "...",
    "parameters": {...}  # JSONSchema
}

and passed in every model invocation.

from pydantic import BaseModel, Field


class GetWeather(BaseModel):
    """Get the current weather in a given location"""

    location: str = Field(..., description="The city and state, e.g. San Francisco, CA")


llm_with_tools = llm.bind_tools([GetWeather])

ai_msg = llm_with_tools.invoke(
    "what is the weather like in San Francisco",
)
ai_msg

AIMessage(content='I am retrieving the current weather for San Francisco.', additional_kwargs={'tool_calls': [{'id': '0', 'function': {'arguments': '{"location":"San Francisco, CA"}', 'name': 'GetWeather'}, 'type': 'function'}], 'refusal': None}, response_metadata={'token_usage': {'completion_tokens': 11, 'prompt_tokens': 151, 'total_tokens': 162, 'completion_tokens_details': None, 'prompt_tokens_details': None}, 'model_name': 'grok-beta', 'system_fingerprint': 'fp_14b89b2dfc', 'finish_reason': 'tool_calls', 'logprobs': None}, id='run-73707da7-afec-4a52-bee1-a176b0ab8585-0', tool_calls=[{'name': 'GetWeather', 'args': {'location': 'San Francisco, CA'}, 'id': '0', 'type': 'tool_call'}], usage_metadata={'input_tokens': 151, 'output_tokens': 11, 'total_tokens': 162, 'input_token_details': {}, 'output_token_details': {}})

API reference

For detailed documentation of all ChatXAI features and configurations head to the API reference: https://python.langchain.com/api_reference/xai/chat_models/langchain_xai.chat_models.ChatXAI.html

Related

• Chat model conceptual guide
• Chat model how-to guides