What is RAG? A Beginner's Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (For Engineers Who Actually Build It)

RAG sounds complicated. It's not. But a lot of introductions to RAG make it sound more mysterious than it actually is. They use terms like "semantic search" and "vector embeddings" and "retrieval pipeline" before explaining what the actual problem is. So let me start differently. The Problem RAG Solves Your AI model has a knowledge cutoff. If you're using Claude, GPT-4, or any modern LLM, it was trained on data up to a specific date. It doesn't know about your company's policies....