brianletort.ai
AI Fundamentals · 101 Level

Frontier Models vs RAG

Your AI is brilliant... but blind to your business.
Learn how frontier models work, their limitations, and how RAG bridges the gap.

175B+

Parameters

~2023

Knowledge Cutoff

0

Access to Your Data

Potential with RAG

Part 1

How Frontier Models Work

ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models are transformer-based neural networks trained on massive text datasets. Here's the magic under the hood.

Stage 1 of 5
1

Input Text

2

Tokenizer

3

Embeddings

4

Attention Layers

5

Output

User Input

What is machine learning?

Part 2

The Knowledge Limitation

Frontier models are frozen in time. They can only know what existed in their training data— and they have zero knowledge of your proprietary information.

Knowledge Cutoff

Knows
Cutoff
Unknown

Question:

Who won the 2022 World Cup?

Response:

In training data

Argentina won the 2022 FIFA World Cup, defeating France in the final.

Click on 2022, 2024, or 2026 to see different responses

Hallucination Demo

User asks:

What was Acme Corp's Q3 2025 revenue?

AI responds:

Example 1 of 3 · Click refresh for more

Part 3

Enter RAG: The Solution

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) bridges the knowledge gap by retrieving relevant information and injecting it into the model's context before generation.

Direct LLM · Step 1 of 3

Query:

What are the key features of our enterprise product?

User Query

LLM Processing

Response

Toggle between Pure LLM and RAG to see the difference

Part 4

RAG Components Deep Dive

RAG systems combine multiple retrieval strategies. Explore each component to understand how they work together.

Vector Embedding Space

Technical Docs
Sales Materials
HR Policies
Product Info
Query

How it works: Documents are converted to high-dimensional vectors (1536 dims), then projected to 3D for visualization.

Similar documents cluster together. When you search, the query becomes a vector and finds nearby documents in this space.

Part 5

Putting It All Together

Watch the complete RAG pipeline in action—from user query to grounded, accurate response.

Ready
User Query

How does our enterprise product handle data security?

Press play to watch the complete RAG pipeline in action

6 steps · ~8 seconds total

See RAG Done Right

SemanticStudio

Everything you just learned—implemented in a production-ready, open-source platform. 28 domain agents, 4-tier memory, GraphRAG-lite, and self-learning ETL.

28 Domain Agents4-Tier MemoryGraphRAG-liteMulti-Provider LLMsMIT Licensed

Now you understand the foundations. Ready to see them in action?