2024 has been a transformative year for retrieval-augmented generation. From architectural innovations to new embedding models, the field has matured significantly.
Major Developments
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Agentic RAG Emerges The integration of RAG with agentic workflows—where AI systems take actions based on retrieved information—has opened new application categories.
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Multi-Modal Retrieval Combining text, images, and structured data in unified retrieval systems became practical this year, thanks to advances in multi-modal embeddings.
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Evaluation Standardization The community converged on better evaluation practices, with MTEB and BEIR becoming standard benchmarks for retrieval quality.
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Enterprise Adoption Fortune 500 companies moved from POCs to production deployments, validating RAG as an enterprise-ready architecture.
Looking Ahead to 2025
We expect continued progress in:
It's an exciting time to be building RAG systems.