watsonx.ai Embeddings

With Watsonx.ai you can run various Large Language Models (LLMs) and generate embeddings from them. Spring AI supports the Watsonx.ai text embeddings with WatsonxAiEmbeddingModel.

An embedding is a vector (list) of floating point numbers. The distance between two vectors measures their relatedness. Small distances suggest high relatedness and large distances suggest low relatedness.

Prerequisites

You first need to have a SaaS instance of watsonx.ai (as well as an IBM Cloud account).

Refer to free-trial to try watsonx.ai for free

More info can be found here

Add Repositories and BOM

Spring AI artifacts are published in Spring Milestone and Snapshot repositories. Refer to the Repositories section to add these repositories to your build system.

To help with dependency management, Spring AI provides a BOM (bill of materials) to ensure that a consistent version of Spring AI is used throughout the entire project. Refer to the Dependency Management section to add the Spring AI BOM to your build system.

Auto-configuration

Spring AI provides Spring Boot auto-configuration for the Watsonx.ai Embedding Model. To enable it add the following dependency to your Maven pom.xml file:

<dependency>
   <groupId>org.springframework.ai</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-ai-watsonx-ai-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>

or to your Gradle build.gradle build file.

dependencies {
    implementation 'org.springframework.ai:spring-ai-watsonx-ai-spring-boot-starter'
}
Refer to the Dependency Management section to add the Spring AI BOM to your build file.

The spring.ai.watsonx.embedding.options.* properties are used to configure the default options used for all embedding requests.

Embedding Properties

The prefix spring.ai.watsonx.ai is used as the property prefix that lets you connect to watsonx.ai.

Property Description Default

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.base-url

The URL to connect to

us-south.ml.cloud.ibm.com

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.embedding-endpoint

The text endpoint

ml/v1/text/embeddings?version=2023-05-29

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.project-id

The project ID

-

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.iam-token

The IBM Cloud account IAM token

-

The prefix spring.ai.watsonx.embedding.options is the property prefix that configures the EmbeddingModel implementation for Watsonx.ai.

Property Description Default

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.embedding.enabled

Enable Watsonx.ai embedding model

true

spring.ai.watsonx.ai.embedding.options.model

The embedding model to be used

ibm/slate-30m-english-rtrvr

Runtime Options

The WatsonxAiEmbeddingOptions.java provides the Watsonx.ai configurations, such as the model to use.

The default options can be configured using the spring.ai.watsonx.embedding.options properties as well.

EmbeddingResponse embeddingResponse = embeddingModel.call(
    new EmbeddingRequest(List.of("Hello World", "World is big and salvation is near"),
        WatsonxAiEmbeddingOptions.create()
            .withModel("Different-Embedding-Model-Deployment-Name"))
);

Sample Controller

This will create an EmbeddingModel implementation that you can inject into your class. Here is an example of a simple @Controller class that uses the EmbeddingModel implementation.

@RestController
public class EmbeddingController {

    private final EmbeddingModel embeddingModel;

    @Autowired
    public EmbeddingController(EmbeddingModel embeddingModel) {
        this.embeddingModel = embeddingModel;
    }

    @GetMapping("/ai/embedding")
    public ResponseEntity<Embedding> embedding(@RequestParam String text) {
        EmbeddingResponse response = this.embeddingModel.embedForResponse(List.of(text));
        return ResponseEntity.ok(response.getResult());
    }
}