LLM concepts

Retrieval

The process of finding relevant external information, documents, memories, or records to use in a model or agent workflow.

Retrieval gives an AI system access to information outside the model's weights. It can search a document index, database, codebase, memory store, or external API before generating an answer or choosing an action.

Good retrieval is judged by whether the right evidence reaches the model at the right time. Poor retrieval can make a capable model look unreliable because the prompt contains irrelevant, stale, or missing context.