Sitemap
TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Member-only story

How to Make a RAG System to Gain Powerful Access to Your Data

13 min readMar 19, 2024

--

A RAG system is an innovative approach to information retrieval. It utilizes traditional information retrieval approaches like vector similarity search combined with state-of-the-art large language model technology. Combined, these technologies make up a robust system that can access vast amounts of information from a simple prompt.

ChatGPT image of a RAG system. Image by ChatGPT. “can you make an illustration of a rag system, illustrate the point of a computer accessing a knowledge base” prompt. ChatGPT, 4, OpenAI, 17 Mar. 2024. https://chat.openai.com.

Motivation

My motivation for this article is my frustration when trying to find an old mail. I typically have some information about the mail, like who the correspondent was or vaguely what the topic of the email was. Still, I must be more specific when doing a direct word search in Gmail, which makes finding the specific mail I am looking for challenging. I would like to have a RAG system that allows me to prompt my emails to search for them. So, if I needed an old email from my university about a subject, I could prompt something like "What technical course did I enroll in during my second year at NTNU?". An equivalent direct word search to this prompt is challenging since I need more specific information in my prompt. Instead, a RAG system could find the mail, given it has all…

--

--

TDS Archive
TDS Archive

Published in TDS Archive

An archive of data science, data analytics, data engineering, machine learning, and artificial intelligence writing from the former Towards Data Science Medium publication.

Eivind Kjosbakken
Eivind Kjosbakken

Written by Eivind Kjosbakken

Data scientist at Findable. Former CS Student at TU Delft and NTNU. I write articles about AI. Reach me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eivind-kjosbakken/