[role="xpack"]
[[get-inference-api]]
=== Get {infer} API

experimental[]

Retrieves {infer} endpoint information.

IMPORTANT: The {infer} APIs enable you to use certain services, such as built-in
{ml} models (ELSER, E5), models uploaded through Eland, Cohere, OpenAI, Azure, Google AI Studio, Google Vertex AI or
Hugging Face. For built-in models and models uploaded through Eland, the {infer}
APIs offer an alternative way to use and manage trained models. However, if you
do not plan to use the {infer} APIs to use these models or if you want to use
non-NLP models, use the <<ml-df-trained-models-apis>>.


[discrete]
[[get-inference-api-request]]
==== {api-request-title}

`GET /_inference`

`GET /_inference/_all`

`GET /_inference/<inference_id>`

`GET /_inference/<task_type>/_all`

`GET /_inference/<task_type>/<inference_id>`

[discrete]
[[get-inference-api-prereqs]]
==== {api-prereq-title}

* Requires the `monitor_inference` <<privileges-list-cluster,cluster privilege>>
(the built-in `inference_admin` and `inference_user` roles grant this privilege)

[discrete]
[[get-inference-api-desc]]
==== {api-description-title}

You can get information in a single API request for:

* a single {infer} endpoint by providing the task type and the {infer} ID,
* all of the {infer} endpoints for a certain task type by providing the task
type and a wildcard expression,
* all of the {infer} endpoints by using a wildcard expression.


[discrete]
[[get-inference-api-path-params]]
==== {api-path-parms-title}

`<inference_id>`::
(Optional, string)
The unique identifier of the {infer} endpoint.


`<task_type>`::
(Optional, string)
The type of {infer} task that the model performs.


[discrete]
[[get-inference-api-example]]
==== {api-examples-title}

The following API call retrieves information about the `my-elser-model` {infer}
model that can perform `sparse_embedding` tasks.


[source,console]
------------------------------------------------------------
GET _inference/sparse_embedding/my-elser-model
------------------------------------------------------------
// TEST[skip:TBD]


The API returns the following response:

[source,console-result]
------------------------------------------------------------
{
  "inference_id": "my-elser-model",
  "task_type": "sparse_embedding",
  "service": "elser",
  "service_settings": {
    "num_allocations": 1,
    "num_threads": 1
  },
  "task_settings": {}
}
------------------------------------------------------------
// NOTCONSOLE