Choosing Your Model

During this course, we are going to be using some AI models. You can either choose a model you already have access to, or you can use the models that I default to during the course.

AI SDK Model Providers

The way the AI SDK works is you have different packages for each different provider. I've installed the three most common ones here, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

But the AI SDK comes with dozens and dozens of different providers that you can potentially hook into, including, if you want to, using local models.

Setting Up a Model

Using a model requires doing two things:

1. Installing the relevant package
2. Adding the correct environment variable to your .env file

Let's look at the packages we have installed:

// Requires an OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable in .env
import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';

// Requires a GOOGLE_GENERATIVE_AI_API_KEY environment variable in .env
import { google } from '@ai-sdk/google';

// Requires an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY environment variable in .env
import { anthropic } from '@ai-sdk/anthropic';

For each provider, you need a specific environment variable:

Instantiating a Model

You can then instantiate the model by just calling this openai or google or anthropic here:

const model = openai('gpt-4o-mini');

console.dir(model, { depth: null });

I'm console logging the model down below just so we can see what it looks like. And we can see that you get an OpenAI responses language model.

You also get autocomplete on the model ID, so you can see all of the available options.

Default Model for the Course

Now, I've chosen Google as our default option. So most of the code in the exercises, by default, will be using Gemini models from Google. The reasons for that are:

• They are extremely cheap
• There is even a free tier to just get an API key and get started
• They run very, very quickly
• They are good enough for our purposes

However, if you want to use OpenAI and Anthropic for your models, all you'll need to do is just swap them out before you start the exercise. If you want to do it across the whole repo, you can probably do a pretty smart find and replace too.

So take this as your opportunity to set up your environment variables and choose your model. If you're not sure which one to go for, just get yourself a Gemini API key.

Steps To Complete

• Decide which AI model provider you want to use (Google Gemini is recommended for beginners)

• Create an API key for your chosen provider

  • For Google: Sign up for Google AI Studio
  • For OpenAI: Create an account and generate an API key
  • For Anthropic: Sign up and obtain an API key

• Add the appropriate environment variable to your .env file

  • For OpenAI: OPENAI_API_KEY=your-key-here
  • For Google: GOOGLE_GENERATIVE_AI_API_KEY=your-key-here
  • For Anthropic: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-key-here

• In the next exercise, we'll verify the setup is working.