RAG often shifts cost from model customization toward data pipelines, retrieval quality, and context assembly. That trade-off can be attractive, but only when the extra layers are measured properly.
Glossary entry
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
A pattern in which a model uses retrieved external context at runtime to generate more grounded answers.
Why it matters
Retrieval-augmented generation matters economically because it can improve output relevance without always requiring fine-tuning, but it also adds context, data, and infrastructure cost that must be included in TCO.
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