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Build Long-Context AI Apps with Jamba: Powering the Future of AI Agents

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January 13, 2025
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Learn to build next-generation AI agents with Jamba in this new course from DeepLearning.AI and AI21 Labs.

We're thrilled to announce a groundbreaking new course – Build Long-Context AI Apps with Jamba – created in partnership with Andrew Ng's DeepLearning.AI and AI21 Labs. This course equips developers with the tools to build the next generation of AI agents using Jamba's revolutionary architecture, showcasing how developers handle long-context applications.

The Evolution of LLMs: Why Agents Need Better Architecture

Through our work developing language models and observing their real-world applications, we at AI21 Labs have gained deep insights into the limitations of current architectures. As enterprises start experimenting and deploying AI agents for complex tasks, we've identified critical bottlenecks in existing models that particularly impact these agents' effectiveness.

Why does context length matter so much for agents? AI agents need to maintain extensive operational memory to perform complex tasks effectively. They must simultaneously hold conversation history, reference materials, task instructions, and intermediate results while working toward their objectives. Traditional models force agents to constantly "forget" critical context, leading to inconsistent performance and broken chains of reasoning.

The Limitations of Current Architectures

Traditional transformer-based architectures, while powerful, struggle with the demands of modern AI agents. Their quadratic computational scaling makes processing long contexts prohibitively expensive, forcing developers to fragment documents and conversations artificially. This fragmentation breaks the very contextual understanding that makes agents effective.

Recently, Mamba architecture emerged as a potential solution, promising linear scaling through selective state-space models. However, our extensive testing revealed that Mamba's efficiency comes at a significant cost to contextual understanding and output quality – precisely the capabilities agents need most.

Introducing Jamba: Purpose-Built for the Agentic Future

This deep understanding of both architectures' limitations led us to develop Jamba – a hybrid architecture that combines the transformer's precise attention mechanisms with Mamba's efficient processing. Our commitment to pushing the boundaries of context length has paid off: Jamba leads the industry with the highest effective context length according to NVIDIA's independent ruler benchmark – a critical advantage for AI agents that need to maintain extensive operational memory while delivering consistent, high-quality outputs. For AI agents, this means:

  • Comprehensive Context Management
    Agents can maintain extensive operational memory without performance degradation, enabling more complex and nuanced task execution.

  • Enhanced Reasoning Capabilities
    The hybrid architecture ensures agents can make connections across vast amounts of information while maintaining coherent reasoning chains.

  • Scalable Performance
    Agents can process entire document collections, conversation histories, and knowledge bases in a single pass, eliminating context fragmentation.

Enterprise-Grade Agent Architecture

Jamba was engineered specifically for enterprise applications where agents need to process complete information landscapes. Instead of the piecemeal approach required by traditional models, Jamba enables agents to:

  • Process complete legal contracts, financial reports, and regulatory filings in a single pass
  • Analyze full customer histories and transaction logs without arbitrary breakpoints
  • Search and understand entire internal wikis, training manuals, and project documentation while maintaining contextual relationships

Building the Future: What You'll Learn

Led by AI21 Labs experts Chen Wang (Lead Alliance Solution Architect) and Chen Almagor (Algorithm Team Lead), this hands-on course equips you with the tools and skills to build sophisticated AI agents using Jamba, focusing on:

  • Core Agent Technologies

    • Leveraging the AI21SDK for comprehensive document processing
    • Building custom agent pipelines with LangChain integration
    • Implementing advanced RAG architectures for knowledge-intensive tasks
    • Developing tool-calling capabilities for specialized agent functions


  • Agent Performance Optimization

    • Efficient memory and token handling for long-running agents
    • Expanding context windows for large-scale operations
    • Ensuring high-quality responses at enterprise scale

Who Should Enroll?

This course is designed for developers with:

  • Basic Python skills
  • An interest in building AI agents and large-scale document processing systems No prior expertise in AI or machine learning is required.

Outcomes

By the end of the course, you'll be able to:

  • Deploy Jamba-powered agents in real-world environments
  • Process and analyze complete documents seamlessly
  • Build scalable, long-context AI systems
  • Integrate sophisticated agents into existing enterprise workflows

Why It Matters

As enterprises increasingly rely on AI agents for complex tasks, the need for architectures that can handle full-context processing becomes paramount. This course equips developers to build the next generation of AI agents that can truly understand and operate within the full scope of enterprise information landscapes.

Ready to build AI agents that meet the demands of modern enterprises? 

Enroll now and start transforming how you handle long-context applications with Jamba.

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