[dvt]

> We’re building some “smart search” functionality for some teams and I start to wonder if a traditional search results list (i.e. sans the LLM, or used only ti rewrite the user query) with the document chunks wouldn’t be better than blindly taking the top N and feeding them to the LLM to produce some response.

Yep, it's a pretty common pattern: query -> embeddings -> vector db -> records -> context -> LLM -> result.

[Xenoamorphous]

Yes that’s basically the RAG pattern, but I’ve edited my comment to elaborate a bit. I’m questioning what the LLM brings to the table vs just showing the search results (a long list not limited by context length) to the user.

The LLM doesn’t even get the full docs most of the time, just chunks. It has a very narrow view so its full power is not used.