#BM25

A long demonstration aisle receding into soft daylight past three chronological computing stations, an early rack server, a mid-2010s GPU chassis and a modern accelerator rack, with a service cart caught mid-roll between the first two carrying one drive component balanced on top

From BM25 to Agentic Retrieval: A History of Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation is usually dated to one 2020 paper. Its lineage is older: 1990s sparse ranking, retrieve-then-read question answering, dense encoders, and now retrieval that decides for itself when to search again.

By Brecht Corbeel · August 11, 2026 · 16 min read

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