Enabling users to connect to an external IBM watsonx.ai foundation model

To enable users to connect to a remote watsonx.ai model from IBM Knowledge Catalog for using generative AI capabilities, you must set up a connection to enable the cluster to communicate with your remote foundation model.

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Prerequisites

The following prerequisites must be met:

Generative AI capabilities and the use of remote foundation models in general must be enabled in your IBM Knowledge Catalog deployment. This setup can be done during installation, upgrade, or at any time later. For more information about the deployment modes, see Preparing to install IBM Knowledge Catalog in the IBM Software Hub documentation.
A remote watsonx.ai instance with appropriate foundation models exists.
You have your user API key for authenticating to the remote system available.

Required permissions

An IBM Knowledge Catalog user with the Administrator role who has access to the remote watsonx.ai instance can set up the connection.

IBM Knowledge Catalog users with any user role who need access to generative AI features must be collaborators in the deployment space that is selected in the setup. Users need to authenticate to the remote watsonx.ai instance with their user API key when they want to use any generative AI features in IBM Knowledge Catalog.

To enable users to connect to a remote watsonx.ai model:

Go to Administration > Configurations and settings and click Generative AI setup.
To configure the connection, click Add connection.
Provide the connection details. Select one of these options:
Cloud service provider

Select a cloud service provider. Before you can proceed, you must acknowledge that use of remote inferencing foundation models will incur additional costs and that data samples are sent to the remote model as additional context for the prompts.

On premises (IP/URL)

Provide the URL or IP address of the remote watsonx.ai instance and specify a port. For enhanced security, use an SSL-enabled port. To ensure that the origin cluster can trust the certificate of the remote cluster, provide the certificate chain of the remote cluster.
To obtain this information, run the openssl command. Do not include the protocol in the <route> value.
```
true | openssl s_client -connect <route>:443 </dev/null 2>/dev/null | awk '/BEGIN/,/END/'
```
The output of the command should have this format:
```
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<certificate>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
```
Copy the complete certificate into the SSL certificate field.
Provide the credentials for authenticating to the remote system. Enter your personal user API key for use with the remote watsonx.ai instance. The API key is stored as a secret in the internal vault for future authentication. For authentication to a remote Cloud Pak for Data cluster, also specify the username that is associated with the provided user API key.
Select a deployment space from your watsonx.ai instance that you have access to.
Click Add connection.

Your setup is complete.

If you want to delete the configuration and start over, click Remove connection. However, remember that this connection is used by any service that connects to the remote watsonx.ai instance to provide generative AI capabilities. If you remove the connection, all jobs that currently use the connection will fail.

To authenticate to the remote system as a user of generative AI capabilities such as metadata expansion in metadata enrichment, complete these steps:

Go to Administration > Configurations and settings and click Generative AI setup.
Provide the credentials for authenticating to the remote system. Enter your personal user API key for use with the remote watsonx.ai instance. The API key is stored as a secret in the internal vault for future authentication. For authentication to a remote IBM Software Hub cluster, also specify the username that is associated with the provided user API key.

Parent topic: Administering IBM Knowledge Catalog