I learned something cool about RAG recently.
If you don’t know what RAG is, it’s been a buzzword in AI for the past six months. RAG stands for Retrieval Augmentation Generation (don’t look at me, I don’t name these things) and it’s a technique for using LLMs (like GPT-4) to answer questions about documents.
When people talk about RAG, I just think about chatting with a PDF. Because that’s mostly what these RAG apps are doing.
The typical RAG pipeline converts a PDF into a format an LLM can understand.
But that’s not really how humans process information. PDFs are messy. There are tables, graphs, images, appendices.
Because I work at Beam, I get exposed to a lot of new LLM design patterns early, and last week I found one that really stood out called ColPali.
ColPali is a new embedding model trained on documents, so it can interpret PDFs like a human would. It can read tables and graphs. And the code is way simpler – you can show it a PDF without preprocessing and immediately start asking questions about it.
If anyone else has been using ColPali in production, I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on it.
Co-Founder of Altrosyn and DIrector at CDTECH | Inventor | Manufacturer
1moIt seems Ramkishan Rohila, Shubham C., Rishu Dwivedi, and Mohit Pandey are offering a timely workshop on LLMs and RAG. You mentioned the ability to curate FAQ documents and build custom search engines, which is crucial in today's information-saturated world. The rise of generative AI has led to an explosion of content, making efficient knowledge retrieval more important than ever. Historically, the development of search engines like Google revolutionized how we access information. Now, with LLMs and RAG, we are entering a new era where AI can not only retrieve information but also understand and synthesize it in meaningful ways. Given this context, what specific strategies will be employed to ensure the Q&A system developed during the workshop is robust enough to handle complex, nuanced queries that go beyond simple keyword matching?