Founded & Funded
RAG Inventor Talks Agents, Grounded AI, and Enterprise Impact
Mar 27, 2025
Douwe Kiela, co-founder and CEO of Contextual AI and co-inventor of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), shares insights on revolutionizing AI systems for enterprises. He dives into the origins of RAG, its often-misunderstood role, and the critical innovations at Contextual AI. Douwe discusses the importance of addressing hallucinations in AI, how to align AI with business value, and offers advice for founding AI companies. He emphasizes the need for adaptability in entrepreneurship and outlines the challenges of successfully deploying AI technologies.
45:26
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Quick takeaways
- Douwe Kiela emphasizes that RAG is often misunderstood and should not be seen as a universal solution, requiring careful application to maximize its potential.
- The podcast highlights the need for robust evaluation frameworks in AI deployment to ensure effective performance measurement and continuous improvement of models.
Deep dives
The Evolution and Purpose of RAG
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) originated from the need to enhance language understanding through grounding, focusing not only on text but also integrating perceptual elements like images. Dao Kiela and his team aimed to create a generative model that could utilize various data types for effective question answering, ultimately using Wikipedia as a grounding source. They leveraged advanced vector databases and language models to allow generative systems to produce contextually accurate responses, marking RAG as a pioneering technique within enterprise AI. RAG was envisioned as an evolving solution rather than a final endpoint, paving the way for subsequent models and methodologies.
