Summary
This chapter explored the key technical components of RAG systems in the context of LangChain: vector stores, retrievers, and LLMs. It provided an in-depth look at the various options available for each component and discussed their strengths, weaknesses, and scenarios in which one option might be better than another.
The chapter started by examining vector stores, which play a crucial role in efficiently storing and indexing vector representations of knowledge base documents. LangChain integrates with various vector store implementations, such as Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, and PostgreSQL with vector extensions. The choice of vector store depends on factors such as scalability, search performance, and deployment requirements. The chapter then moved on to discuss retrievers, which are responsible for querying the vector store and retrieving the most relevant documents based on the input query. LangChain offers a range of retriever implementations, including dense retrievers...