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RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

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Re: RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

#121

Post by bob1029 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #72
pixelbro wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've not seen such a clipped cadence out of an LLM. I would not automatically suspect the GP. Maybe there's better ways to spend your time?

Maybe people are just learning to write in that style LLMs learned to write from statistical people? "is where the capabilities become unbounded" is a weird thing to say and not really true. "is the end game", "add non determinism on top of non determinism", there are a lot of AI-isms in this short comment. But it's possible people are just learning to write this way now, I am curious if that's so too! As far as uses…

It would seem AI psychosis flows both ways.

Re: RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

#125

Post by maxrumpf »

The easiest way to strip complexity is to expose simple tools to an agent model like SID-1 that can use them well. It makes more of an effort for hard questions, and little effort for easy ones.

(found of sid.ai so obv biased)

Re: RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

#126

Post by marginalia_nu »

imtringued wrote: post #26
simianwords wrote: post #17

OT but its interesting that none of the harnesses today use embeddings but just simple grep. I would not have predicted this

Ok? I'm not seeing how that is interesting, you're exclusively focusing on coding which requires precise substring locations. Google is basically almost entirely driven by embedding models now.

A lot of this is due the size of the corpus.

Grep falls apart for severely underspecified queries, which is the difficult part of web search. For any given query in web search there can be several millions of candidate results. You can get good results with FTS as well, but just finding phrase matches is inadequate, you need more ranking signals to find relevant results.

When Claude is looking for a function in your code base, it needs to sift through dozens of matches. This is not hard, and anything beyond grep is likely not worth the effort.

Re: RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

#128

Post by yipinwong »

Only those who mastered the craft makes their work look simple.

The AI that wrote this might be the master not the writer, as this looks written by AIs.

I will use the author's agents, not read his articles or use him for the job.

Re: RAG Is Simpler Than You Think

#130

Post by pantsforbirds »

7734128 wrote: post #2

There have been many blogs like this over the last years. Yes, embeddings are computationally heavy, but they are not at all complicated and they provide a lot of benefit. 90% of "document" based RAG projects should view semantic search with embeddings as their primary method. It's very powerful and so easy to implement that you could try it out and discover whether performance would be an issue rather than trying to…

I think it's VERY project specific. If you are looking for anything technical at all, then keyword search almost always does better (in my experience). I'd actually recommend starting with keyword search, and then expanding with embeddings after you have a better idea of what your users are trying to determine.
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