the.com/retrieval
Finding the right needle before you ask the AI to sew with it.
means The act of fetching the right piece of information back out of storage when you need it.
from From French retrouver, 'to find again,' built from re- (again) plus trouver (to find). It entered English in hunting jargon, where a retriever dog was prized for finding and bringing back game — and that fetch-and-return sense is exactly what the word still does, whether the hunter is a spaniel or a search algorithm.
- not search
- Search ranks pages, retrieval feeds answers directly to models
- garbage in
- Bad retrieval makes confident, well-written, wrong answers
- embeddings
- Turns meaning into coordinates, then measures distance between them
- the bottleneck
- Most RAG failures are retrieval failures, not model failures