Boss Llama: Building a Smart Interview Simulator using Llama 3.1 70B

Moving a bit further from writing and exploring the world of LLMs as just a consumer of the vast knowledge and context awareness, I took it upon myself to build a product out of these tools. Boss Llama is an interactive intelligent interview simulator on Meta's Llama 3.1 70B.

Although not a novel implementation, I hope my tutorial helps you understand the various API calls and functions involved in processing chat, inputs, and data files in a Streamlit Web Application using Tune Studio to deploy our model and set API gateways for inference. So, let's look at how you can replicate the same results.

The Model: Llama 3.1 70B

An Open Source LLM, Meta's Llama 3.1 70B, has good reasons to become my choice for the product. By improving the context window from 8K to 128K from its predecessor, Llama 3 70B, the model also brings a more significant threshold for output tokens, 4096, over the previous 2048 context.

• Analysis taken from Aritificial Analysis

Earlier, however, I had tried implementing a locally hosted Llama 3.1 8B for the task, which unfortunately lacks the context windows expected off of the use-case, which typically involves more extended exchanges averaging about 1500-2000 words or 2000+ tokens. So let us now check out how you can also make such an application.

Implementation

Regarding the implementation, we have chosen Streamlit as the base of our operations, helping us tie up the outputs generated by the API calls to a chat interface. Unfortunately, the larger model asks for a higher VRAM, which I have chosen to fulfill using Tune Studio's API Calls.

While discussing the code, however, we will skip over the Streamlit part and focus on its API aspect. If you wish to see how I implement that, check out my video tutorial on YouTube here or head over to the Github Repository here!

For the upcoming code, here are some essential variables:

• Conversation: A session state variable holding all the conversation exchanges between the bot and the user.
• Difficulty: The difficulty of the simulated interview
• API Key: Your Tune Studio API Key
• Max Questions: Number of Questions in the Interview

System Prompt

Finetuning is the best way to get a model to perform exactly how you want it to; well, I went for the next best thing: a thoughtful and thorough system prompt. While choosing the system prompt, we should be detailed with our requirements, as the model tends to meander and hallucinate if such instructions are not given.

The latest adversarial training on the modern Llama models also allows us to pass such a system prompt, avoiding any prompt leakage.

You are Boss Llama, an advanced AI interviewer. Your goal is to conduct a comprehensive and intelligent interview with the candidate based on the following details:


Job Description: {st.session_state.job_description}
Difficulty Level: {difficulty}
Number of Questions: {st.session_state.max_questions}


Instructions:


Start the Interview:


Begin by presenting a detailed job description for the role based on the difficulty level and the provided job description. Try to keep this introduction small and to the point as the user already knows what they are interviewing for.
Provide a warm welcome message to start the interview and set a positive tone.



Generate and Ask Questions:


Ask a series of questions, up to the specified number of questions. Ensure these questions are relevant to the job description and appropriately challenging according to the difficulty level.
Provide clear and concise prompts that assess the candidate's skills, knowledge, and fit for the role.



Conduct the Interview:


Engage with the candidate in a conversational manner. If the candidate's responses are vague or insufficient, let them know about it and give them a chance to improve, but count it as one more question.
Maintain a professional and supportive tone throughout the interview.

Generating Responses

We will generate the responses and the conversation using a curl command from Tune Studio. The command is a simple way of linking your current working code with a model of your choice on Tune Studio, which holds an amazingly massive library of free models for inference and even more advanced models with custom fine-tuning and deploying practices for hard-core enthusiasts.

The variable "conversation," which incrementally holds the ongoing conversation, is called every time to create a response that adds to the existing discussion.

With parameters such as temperature, frequency_penaly, and max_tokens, we can also tweak the quality of responses, further enhancing the feeling of being interviewed by a proper interviewer.

  
  
  Function to call the API


def generate_response(conversation, apikey):

    url = "https://proxy.tune.app/chat/completions"

    headers = {

        "Authorization": apikey,  # Your API key

        "Content-Type": "application/json"

    }

# Construct the payload for the API call
payload = {
    "temperature": 0.9,
    "messages": conversation,
    "model": "meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct",
    "stream": False,
    "frequency_penalty": 0.2,
    "max_tokens": 500
}

# Send the POST request to the API
response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(payload))

# Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
    # Extract the response from the JSON output
    return response.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"]
else:
    return f"Error: {response.status_code} - {response.text}"



    

    

Generate Evaluations

For the evaluations, we are using a similar API call. We only pass the individual exchanges from the bot and the user to run an assessment using a suitable system prompt.

This second call activates the interviewer's harsher and more intense side. This new call then looks at the conversation from a third perspective and assigns feedback and a score that feeds back into the web application.

  
  
  Function to generate evaluations on the interview


def generate_evaluation(question, answer, difficulty, apikey):

    url = "https://proxy.tune.app/chat/completions"

    headers = {

        "Authorization": apikey,

        "Content-Type": "application/json"

    }

payload = {
    "temperature": 0.7,
    "messages": [
        {"role": "system", "content": f"Evaluate the following answer based on the job description difficulty level: {difficulty}."},
        {"role": "user", "content": f"Question: {question}\nAnswer: {answer}"}
    ],
    "model": "meta/llama-3.1-70b-instruct",
    "stream": False,
    "frequency_penalty": 0.2,
    "max_tokens": 500
}

try:
    response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(payload))
    response.raise_for_status()
    result = response.json()
    feedback = result.get("choices", [{}])[0].get("message", {}).get("content", "No feedback provided")
    score = result.get("choices", [{}])[0].get("score", 0)
    return feedback, score
except requests.RequestException as e:
    return f"Error: {e}", 0



    

    

Download PDF Report

Well, finally, what good is progress in AI? Suppose all we are doing is asking it to write our assignment. In that case, the final function links the outputs generated by the Evaluation function to FPDF to generate a plausible and downloadable PDF for the evaluation.

What is FPDF, you ask? FPDF, initially a PHP class, is a library used for PDF document generation under Python. Compared to other jargon available online, FPDF provides a more streamlined and straightforward way to generate PDFs. (It also allows us to add PNGs, JPEGs, and GIFs to the PDF, which should be a boon if we wish to add systems to include tacky diagrams in the report.)

  
  
  Function to generate a PDF report


def generate_pdf_report(evaluations):

    pdf = FPDF()

    pdf.add_page()

    pdf.set_font("Arial", size=12)

pdf.cell(0, 10, "Interview Evaluation Report", ln=True, align="C")
pdf.ln(10)  # Add a line break

for evaluation in evaluations:
    pdf.set_font("Arial", style='B', size=12)
    pdf.multi_cell(0, 10, evaluation["Question"])
    pdf.set_font("Arial", size=12)
    pdf.multi_cell(0, 10, evaluation["Answer"])
    pdf.multi_cell(0, 10, f"Feedback: {evaluation['Feedback']}")
    pdf.multi_cell(0, 10, f"Score: {evaluation['Score']}")
    pdf.ln(5)  # Add a line break

# Save the PDF to a temporary file
temp_file = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False, suffix=".pdf")
pdf.output(temp_file.name)
return temp_file.name



    

    

Conclusion

Here, we saw an implementation of Llama 3.1 70B in a Streamlit Web Application to simulate brilliant interviews using a chat interface. Although the final product lacks some accessibility features such as TTS or STT, it shows great promise in the way even a model that is not fine-tuned can operate using just system prompts.