RAG Explained for Beginners: How AI Assistants Stop Making Things Up (opens in new tab)

I once submitted an essay with three citations that I hadn't personally verified. The AI had suggested them, and they sounded right. None of them existed. That's not a quirk or a bug — it's exactly how LLMs work. And once you understand why, a technique called RAG starts to make a lot of sense. AI assistants are remarkably good at sounding right. The model isn't lying — it's doing its best with what it knows. The problem is that what it knows has limits, and it doesn't always know where those...