I Tried to Learn RAG and Got Stuck on API Costs. Turns Out My CPU Could Do the Expensive Bit.

Automated excerpt

That meant another API key, another service to depend on, another rate limit to think about, and potentially another bill. And weirdly, stripping things away helped me understand RAG much better than adding more AI tooling ever did. The useful lesson wasn't actually about RAG I started this project because I wanted to understand embeddings, retrieval and RAG. You do not need an embedding API to create embeddings. You do not need an enormous framework to understand RAG.

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