Building RAG Systems: A Complete Guide

Imagine you ask ChatGPT about your company’s internal refund policy. It either makes something up or tells you it doesn’t know. That’s not a model problem, that’s a data problem. The model was never trained on your documents. RAG is how you fix that. 1. What is RAG? RAG stands for Retrieval Augmented Generation. Let’s unpack what that actually means in plain terms. Think of a regular LLM as a very well-read person who studied everything on the internet up until a certain date, then went into a room with no phone, no books, and no internet. Smart, but limited to what they already know.