RAG: How AI Models Use Your Data Without Forgetting

Introduction Large language models are stateless. Every time you start a conversation with one, it begins from zero, with no memory of previous sessions, no access to your internal documents, no awareness of events that happened after it was trained. This is a fundamental architectural constraint, not a bug. By default, an LLM has no access to private or real-time data unless explicitly integrated via external systems. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is the pattern that addresses this. Inst