There’s something incredibly exciting about recognizing patterns in technology cycles.

The current AI wave feels like a sudden gold rush. But gold rushes don’t create gold. They reveal what was already there.

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, but that knowledge is static at the moment training ends. They do not automatically know your latest documents, your internal data, or what changed yesterday. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are used to bridge that gap. By retrieving relevant information in real time and injecting it as context, we can augment what the model sees and improve what it predicts next.

And beneath that entire mechanism lies a discipline that has been evolving for decades: information retrieval.

This post explores how modern AI architectures build on earlier search technologies, what truly changed when retrieval began feeding generative models, and why the real riches belong to those who understand the foundations.

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