Last Week’s Struggles and Lessons (Week Ending 11/17/24)

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

  • No material struggles this week.  

What I learned:

  • Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) comes in various flavors (see here), and all of them have shortcomings. The main hurdle is that information indexing can’t be adjusted. It’s a bit of a black box. RAG might not be viable for the “book library” MVP.
  • I thought Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was throttling my account last week, impacting the depth of query results from the Gemini LLM. The issue may have been that GCP’s RAG tools could not index a large data set like a book, which led to shallow responses.
  • A database can structure and store information, which helps make the data more useful. A database needs a schema. A database might be a necessity for this project.
  • The prepackaged solutions meant to save time are good for generic use cases. This project is individualized and may require more solutions to be built from scratch.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!