What is RAG, the technique that helps companies to leverage Generative AI?

❓What is RAG, the technique that helps companies to leverage Generative AI?





If you have used ChatGPT or Bard (now Gemini), you know how useful GenAI can be. It can answer your questions, summarize books 📘 and write articles. There are a host of other things that you can do with LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini, by learning a bit about how to write prompts.

All this is good for personal use. But what about the use of LLMs inside organizations 🏢? Not many applications of ChatGPT for companies come to mind.

The idea 💡that helped companies to make use of LLMs is ‘augmentation’. In simple words, it means including additional information in the prompt.

This additional information comes from a source within the company. It can be a contract 📃, records from a database or even a powerpoint presentation. We can also combine information from many sources and include it in the prompt.

Of course, the additional information must be first fetched from the right source. A CXO wants to know the implications of a very important contract made by his company. Then the contents of the contracts must be pulled out first, for adding to the prompt. This is called ‘retrieval’ 🚚.

This technique of prompting an LLM is called Retrieval Augmented Generation or RAG. ‘Generation’ here refers to the job done by the LLM, using the prompt ‘augmented’ with the company specific information ‘retrieved’ from its source.

Some of the use cases of RAG are:

Q&A: employees can simply ask queries about contracts, projects, leaves, reports and many more things.

Summarization: reading long documents such as reports or notifications becomes easy with apt summaries.

Generation: executives can generate documents based on similar documents created in the past.

RAG is currently the most popular form of Gen AI applications in enterprises.


🌱 🌱 🌱 🌱 💐

How do LLMs do all these things? I have explained it all in my book  📙‘Decoding GPT: an intuitive understanding of Large Language Models’📙
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HNwbhG

retrievalaugmentedgeneration
llm
generativeai
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By Devesh Rajadhyax
Co-Founder, Cere Labs

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