When I started working in search 10+ years ago, people would build a beautiful UI, and then, only on shipping, realize the search results were trash + irrelevant. They imagined a search system like Elasticsearch was basically Google. When in reality, Elasticsearch is just a bit of infrastructure. A framework, not a solution.
There's a similar thing happening on RAG. Where people think building the chat interaction is the hard thing. The hard thing is extracting + searching to get relevant context. A lot of founders I talk to suddenly realize this at the last minute, right before shipping, similar to search back in the day. It's harder than just throwing chunks in a vector DB. It involves a lot of different backend data sources potentially, and is in many ways harder than a standard search relevance problem (which is itself hard enough).
There's a similar thing happening on RAG. Where people think building the chat interaction is the hard thing. The hard thing is extracting + searching to get relevant context. A lot of founders I talk to suddenly realize this at the last minute, right before shipping, similar to search back in the day. It's harder than just throwing chunks in a vector DB. It involves a lot of different backend data sources potentially, and is in many ways harder than a standard search relevance problem (which is itself hard enough).