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Create inference API

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Create inference API

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This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

Creates an inference endpoint to perform an inference task.

The inference APIs enable you to use certain services, such as built-in machine learning models (ELSER, E5), models uploaded through Eland, Cohere, OpenAI, or Hugging Face. For built-in models and models uploaded through Eland, the inference APIs offer an alternative way to use and manage trained models. However, if you do not plan to use the inference APIs to use these models or if you want to use non-NLP models, use the Machine learning trained model APIs.

Request

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PUT /_inference/<task_type>/<inference_id>

Prerequisites

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Requires the manage cluster privilege.

Description

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The create inference API enables you to create an inference endpoint and configure a machine learning model to perform a specific inference task.

The following services are available through the inference API:

Cohere
ELSER
Hugging Face
OpenAI
Elasticsearch (for built-in models and models uploaded through Eland)

Path parameters

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<inference_id>

(Required, string) The unique identifier of the inference endpoint.

<task_type>

(Required, string) The type of the inference task that the model will perform. Available task types:

sparse_embedding,
text_embedding.

Request body

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service

(Required, string) The type of service supported for the specified task type. Available services:

cohere: specify the text_embedding task type to use the Cohere service.
elser: specify the sparse_embedding task type to use the ELSER service.
hugging_face: specify the text_embedding task type to use the Hugging Face service.
openai: specify the text_embedding task type to use the OpenAI service.
elasticsearch: specify the text_embedding task type to use the E5 built-in model or text embedding models uploaded by Eland.

service_settings

(Required, object) Settings used to install the inference model. These settings are specific to the service you specified.

service_settings for the cohere service

api_key: (Required, string) A valid API key of your Cohere account. You can find your Cohere API keys or you can create a new one on the API keys settings page.

You need to provide the API key only once, during the inference model creation. The Get inference API does not retrieve your API key. After creating the inference model, you cannot change the associated API key. If you want to use a different API key, delete the inference model and recreate it with the same name and the updated API key.

embedding_type

(Optional, string) Specifies the types of embeddings you want to get back. Defaults to float. Valid values are:

byte: use it for signed int8 embeddings (this is a synonym of int8).
float: use it for the default float embeddings.
int8: use it for signed int8 embeddings.

model_id

(Optional, string) The name of the model to use for the inference task. To review the available models, refer to the Cohere docs. Defaults to embed-english-v2.0.

service_settings for the elser service

num_allocations: (Required, integer) The number of model allocations to create. num_allocations must not exceed the number of available processors per node divided by the num_threads.
num_threads: (Required, integer) The number of threads to use by each model allocation. num_threads must not exceed the number of available processors per node divided by the number of allocations. Must be a power of 2. Max allowed value is 32.

service_settings for the hugging_face service

api_key: (Required, string) A valid access token of your Hugging Face account. You can find your Hugging Face access tokens or you can create a new one on the settings page.

url: (Required, string) The URL endpoint to use for the requests.

service_settings for the openai service

api_key: (Required, string) A valid API key of your OpenAI account. You can find your OpenAI API keys in your OpenAI account under the API keys section.

dimensions: (Optional, integer) The number of dimensions the resulting output embeddings should have. Only supported in text-embedding-3 and later models. If not set the OpenAI defined default for the model is used.
model_id: (Required, string) The name of the model to use for the inference task. Refer to the OpenAI documentation for the list of available text embedding models.
organization_id: (Optional, string) The unique identifier of your organization. You can find the Organization ID in your OpenAI account under Settings > Organizations.
url: (Optional, string) The URL endpoint to use for the requests. Can be changed for testing purposes. Defaults to https://api.openai.com/v1/embeddings.

service_settings for the elasticsearch service

model_id: (Required, string) The name of the model to use for the inference task. It can be the ID of either a built-in model (for example, .multilingual-e5-small for E5) or a text embedding model already uploaded through Eland.
num_allocations: (Required, integer) The number of model allocations to create. num_allocations must not exceed the number of available processors per node divided by the num_threads.
num_threads: (Required, integer) The number of threads to use by each model allocation. num_threads must not exceed the number of available processors per node divided by the number of allocations. Must be a power of 2. Max allowed value is 32.

task_settings

(Optional, object) Settings to configure the inference task. These settings are specific to the <task_type> you specified.

task_settings for the text_embedding task type

input_type

(optional, string) For cohere service only. Specifies the type of input passed to the model. Valid values are:

classification: use it for embeddings passed through a text classifier.
clusterning: use it for the embeddings run through a clustering algorithm.
ingest: use it for storing document embeddings in a vector database.
search: use it for storing embeddings of search queries run against a vector data base to find relevant documents.

truncate

(Optional, string) For cohere service only. Specifies how the API handles inputs longer than the maximum token length. Defaults to END. Valid values are:

NONE: when the input exceeds the maximum input token length an error is returned.
START: when the input exceeds the maximum input token length the start of the input is discarded.
END: when the input exceeds the maximum input token length the end of the input is discarded.

Examples

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This section contains example API calls for every service type.

Cohere service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called cohere_embeddings to perform a text_embedding task type.

resp = client.inference.put_model(
    task_type="text_embedding",
    inference_id="cohere-embeddings",
    body={
        "service": "cohere",
        "service_settings": {
            "api_key": "<api_key>",
            "model_id": "embed-english-light-v3.0",
            "embedding_type": "byte",
        },
    },
)
print(resp)

PUT _inference/text_embedding/cohere-embeddings
{
    "service": "cohere",
    "service_settings": {
        "api_key": "<api_key>",
        "model_id": "embed-english-light-v3.0",
        "embedding_type": "byte"
    }
}

E5 via the elasticsearch service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called my-e5-model to perform a text_embedding task type.

resp = client.inference.put_model(
    task_type="text_embedding",
    inference_id="my-e5-model",
    body={
        "service": "elasticsearch",
        "service_settings": {
            "num_allocations": 1,
            "num_threads": 1,
            "model_id": ".multilingual-e5-small",
        },
    },
)
print(resp)

PUT _inference/text_embedding/my-e5-model
{
  "service": "elasticsearch",
  "service_settings": {
    "num_allocations": 1,
    "num_threads": 1,
    "model_id": ".multilingual-e5-small" 
  }
}

The model_id must be the ID of one of the built-in E5 models. Valid values are .multilingual-e5-small and .multilingual-e5-small_linux-x86_64. For further details, refer to the E5 model documentation.

ELSER service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called my-elser-model to perform a sparse_embedding task type.

resp = client.inference.put_model(
    task_type="sparse_embedding",
    inference_id="my-elser-model",
    body={
        "service": "elser",
        "service_settings": {"num_allocations": 1, "num_threads": 1},
    },
)
print(resp)

PUT _inference/sparse_embedding/my-elser-model
{
  "service": "elser",
  "service_settings": {
    "num_allocations": 1,
    "num_threads": 1
  }
}

Example response:

{
  "inference_id": "my-elser-model",
  "task_type": "sparse_embedding",
  "service": "elser",
  "service_settings": {
    "num_allocations": 1,
    "num_threads": 1
  },
  "task_settings": {}
}

Hugging Face service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called hugging-face-embeddings to perform a text_embedding task type.

resp = client.inference.put_model(
    task_type="text_embedding",
    inference_id="hugging-face-embeddings",
    body={
        "service": "hugging_face",
        "service_settings": {
            "api_key": "<access_token>",
            "url": "<url_endpoint>",
        },
    },
)
print(resp)

PUT _inference/text_embedding/hugging-face-embeddings
{
  "service": "hugging_face",
  "service_settings": {
    "api_key": "<access_token>", 
    "url": "<url_endpoint>" 
  }
}

	A valid Hugging Face access token. You can find on the settings page of your account.
	The inference endpoint URL you created on Hugging Face.

Create a new inference endpoint on the Hugging Face endpoint page to get an endpoint URL. Select the model you want to use on the new endpoint creation page - for example intfloat/e5-small-v2 - then select the Sentence Embeddings task under the Advanced configuration section. Create the endpoint. Copy the URL after the endpoint initialization has been finished.

The list of recommended models for the Hugging Face service:

Models uploaded by Eland via the elasticsearch service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called my-msmarco-minilm-model to perform a text_embedding task type.

resp = client.inference.put_model(
    task_type="text_embedding",
    inference_id="my-msmarco-minilm-model",
    body={
        "service": "elasticsearch",
        "service_settings": {
            "num_allocations": 1,
            "num_threads": 1,
            "model_id": "msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5",
        },
    },
)
print(resp)

PUT _inference/text_embedding/my-msmarco-minilm-model
{
  "service": "elasticsearch",
  "service_settings": {
    "num_allocations": 1,
    "num_threads": 1,
    "model_id": "msmarco-MiniLM-L12-cos-v5" 
  }
}

The model_id must be the ID of a text embedding model which has already been uploaded through Eland.

OpenAI service

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The following example shows how to create an inference endpoint called openai-embeddings to perform a text_embedding task type. The embeddings created by requests to this endpoint will have 128 dimensions.

PUT _inference/text_embedding/openai_embeddings
{
    "service": "openai",
    "service_settings": {
        "api_key": "<api_key>",
        "model_id": "text-embedding-3-small",
        "dimensions": 128
    }
}

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