I implemented many RAGs and feel sorry for anyone proclaiming "RAG is dead". These folks have never implemented one, maybe followed a tutorial and installed a "Hello World!" project but that's it.
I don't want to go into detail but 100% agree with the author's conclusion: data is key. Data ingestion to be precisely. Simply using docling and transforming PDFs to markdown and have a vector database doing the rest is ridiculous.
For example, for a high precision RAG with 100% accuracy in pricing as part of the information that RAG provided, I took a week to build a ETL for a 20 page PDF document to separate information between SQL and Graph Database.
And this was a small step with all the tweaking that laid ahead to ensure exceptional results.
What search algorithm or: how many? Embeddings, which quality? Semantics, how and which exactly?
Believe me, RAG is the finest of technical masterpiece there is. I have so many respect for the folks at OpenAI and Anthropic for the ingestion processes and tools they use, because they operate on a level, I will never touch with my RAG implementations.
RAG is really something you should try for yourself, if you love to solve tricky fundamental problems that in the end can provide a lot of value to you or your customers.
Simply don't believe the hype and ignore all "install and embed" solutions. They are crap, sorry to say so.
I don't want to go into detail but 100% agree with the author's conclusion: data is key. Data ingestion to be precisely. Simply using docling and transforming PDFs to markdown and have a vector database doing the rest is ridiculous.
For example, for a high precision RAG with 100% accuracy in pricing as part of the information that RAG provided, I took a week to build a ETL for a 20 page PDF document to separate information between SQL and Graph Database.
And this was a small step with all the tweaking that laid ahead to ensure exceptional results.
What search algorithm or: how many? Embeddings, which quality? Semantics, how and which exactly?
Believe me, RAG is the finest of technical masterpiece there is. I have so many respect for the folks at OpenAI and Anthropic for the ingestion processes and tools they use, because they operate on a level, I will never touch with my RAG implementations.
RAG is really something you should try for yourself, if you love to solve tricky fundamental problems that in the end can provide a lot of value to you or your customers.
Simply don't believe the hype and ignore all "install and embed" solutions. They are crap, sorry to say so.