Troubleshooting Issues with Azure OpenAI and Nemo Guardrails 0.14.0

If you are employing Azure OpenAI as your primary model in conjunction with the Nemo Guardrails framework, you may have encountered difficulties after updating to version 0.14.0. Previously, with Nemo Guardrails 0.11.0, everything functioned smoothly. However, after the recent upgrade, issues have begun to surface.

I spent some time troubleshooting to determine whether the model configuration from the config folder was being improperly passed. To my satisfaction, all configurations appeared to be correct. Unfortunately, I couldn’t uncover any documentation clarifying what specifically changed in the latest release of Nemo Guardrails that could be causing this disruption.

The error message generated is as follows:

.\venv\Lib\site-packages\nemoguardrails\Ilm\models\langchain_initializer.py", line 193, in init_langchain_model raise ModellnitializationError(base) from last_exception nemoguardrails.Ilm.models.langchain_initializer.ModellnitializationError: Failed to initialize model 'gpt-40-mini' with provider 'azure' in 'chat' mode: ValueError encountered in initializer_init_text_completion_model(modes=['text', 'chat']) for model: gpt-40-mini and provider: azure: 1 validation error for OpenAIChat Value error, Did not find openai_api_key, please add an environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY which contains it, or pass openai_api_key as a named parameter. [type=value_error, input_value={'api_key': '9DUJj5JczBLw...

The crux of the issue seems to center around the absence of the OPENAI_API_KEY variable, which is required for the model initialization when using Azure as a provider. Your next steps should involve ensuring that this environment variable is correctly set up or that the API key is passed as a parameter where needed.

If you are also facing similar challenges or have insights regarding changes in version 0.14.0’s handling of model configurations, please share your experiences or recommendations. Collaboration can help us all navigate these updates more smoothly!