How can AI use your own documents?
Retrieval-augmented generation: embed, retrieve, augment the prompt, generate.
Transcript
A language model only knows what was in its training data, which is frozen in time.
It cannot see your private documents, or yesterday's news, so it may simply guess.
Documents are split into chunks, and each chunk becomes an embedding: a point on a map of meaning.
Your question becomes a point too, and the nearest chunks are retrieved.
The retrieved chunks are pasted into the prompt, next to your question.
Now the model answers from real sources, and can even cite them.
Retrieve, augment, generate. That is retrieval augmented generation: it gives the model an open book.
More in this series
1:14How does AI work?
Neurons and weights, learning from mistakes, and predicting the next word.
1:13How does AI read a sentence?
Tokens, embeddings and attention, stacked in layers to score the next token.
1:17What are billions of parameters?
What a parameter is, how big a billion is, and why big models need racks of GPUs.
1:26How do networks learn from errors?
Loss as a landscape, gradient descent and backpropagation.
1:24How is a chatbot trained?
Pretraining, fine-tuning and human feedback turn a text predictor into an assistant.
1:23What does temperature do?
Scores become probabilities, and temperature sharpens or flattens them.
1:19How does AI draw pictures?
Diffusion models add noise to learn, then remove it to create, steered by a prompt.
1:14Why does AI make things up?
Likely is not the same as true: gaps, snowballing errors, and what helps.
1:16How much can an AI remember?
The context window, forgetting, the cost of long inputs, and workarounds.
1:09What is an AI agent?
A model in a loop with tools and guardrails.
1:12Can AI be biased?
Skewed data, where bias comes from, proxies, and how to audit and fix it.
1:10What is overfitting?
Underfit, good fit and overfit curves, train vs test error, and the fixes.