RAG
[ rag ]noun
Looking things up in your own documents and handing the relevant bits to the AI at the moment you ask, instead of hoping it already knew.
Explanation
From a 2020 research paper, now the normal way to make a general-purpose AI answer questions about your particular stuff. Most of the time it fails, it failed at the looking-up part, not the answering part.
Related words
- embedding — A way of turning text into numbers, so a computer can tell which pieces mean roughly the same thing.
- reranking — A second sorting step that reorders search results by how well they actually answer the question.
- context engineering — Deciding on purpose what goes in front of the AI: the instructions, the files, the notes, the tools, the earlier conversation.