Equation 7 · RAG in 2035: Four Scenarios, Their Signals, and What Would Falsify Them
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
the number of tokens. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
How to interpret it
Read this expression with the definitions, units, and assumptions supplied by the article.
What the article says around this equation
As a corpus grows, the two costs diverge regardless of how cheap or how large any single model’s window becomes, because M keeps growing too. This is the economic argument for why explicit retrieval persists even in scenarios where verifiability is weak: corpus growth, not just model quality, keeps a bounded fetch cheaper than a full paste. It says nothing about whether that fetch is checkable, which is exactly why Axis B has to be argued separately rather than assumed to follow from Axis A.
Sources cited in the article section
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to RAG in 2035: Four Scenarios, Their Signals, and What Would Falsify Them