BrandPost: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG): The open-book test for generative AI
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 marked a groundbreaking moment for AI, introducing the world to an entirely new realm of possibilities created by the fusion of generative AI (genAI) and machine learning foundation models, or large language models (LLMs).
In order to truly unlock the power of LLMs, organizations need to not only access the innovative commercial and open-source models but also feed them vast amounts of quality internal and up-to-date data. By combining a mix of proprietary and public data in the models, organizations can expect more accurate and relevant LLM responses that better mirror what's happening at the moment.
The ideal way to do this today is by leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a powerful approach in natural language processing (NLP) that combines information retrieval and text generation. Most people by now are familiar with the concept of prompt engineering, which is essentially augmenting prompts to direct the LLM to answer in a certain way. With RAG, you're augmenting prompts with proprietary data to direct the LLM to return answers based on contextual data. The retrieved information serves as a basis for generating coherent and contextually relevant text. This combination allows AI models to provide more accurate, informative, and context-aware responses to queries or prompts.