Send us a text We're joined by Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual.ai and pioneer in RAG research. From deploying AI agents at Fortune 500 companies to shedding light on data privacy and security, Douwe shares his expertise and insights on how to make data simple, effective, and secure. 00:46 Introducing Douwe Kiela 01:37 RAG - Here to Stay or Go? 06:59 LLMs with Context 08:20 Making AI Successful 10:34 Why Contextual AI? 17:18 LLM versus SLMs 20:28 Speed over Perfection 22:07 Hallucinations 26:02 Making AI Easy to Consume 28:50 Defining an Agent 32:53 Reaching Contextual AI 33:14 The Contrarian View 34:37 The Risks of AI 36:53 For Fun

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/douwekiela Website: https://contextual.ai/   Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple?  Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next.  The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.  Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [email protected] and tell us why you should be next. The Making Data Simple Podcast is hosted by Al Martin, WW VP Technical Sales, IBM, where we explore trending technologies, business innovation, and leadership ... while keeping it simple & fun.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) continues to be a foundational approach in AI despite claims of its demise. While some marketing narratives suggest RAG is being replaced by fine-tuning or long context windows, these technologies are actually complementary rather than competitive. But how do you build a truly effective RAG system that delivers accurate results in high-stakes environments? What separates a basic RAG implementation from an enterprise-grade solution that can handle complex queries across disparate data sources? And with the rise of AI agents, how will RAG evolve to support more dynamic reasoning capabilities? Douwe Kiela is the CEO and co-founder of Contextual AI, a company at the forefront of next-generation language model development. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, where he contributes to advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of AI systems. Before founding Contextual AI, Douwe was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, where he led groundbreaking efforts in natural language processing and machine learning. Prior to that, he was a Research Scientist and Research Lead at Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team, where he played a pivotal role in developing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)—a paradigm-shifting innovation in AI that combines retrieval systems with generative models for more grounded and contextually aware responses. In the episode, Richie and Douwe explore the misconceptions around the death of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the evolution to RAG 2.0, its applications in high-stakes industries, the importance of metadata and entitlements in data governance, the potential of agentic systems in enterprise settings, and much more. Links Mentioned in the Show: Contextual AIConnect with DouweCourse: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with LangChainRelated Episode: High Performance Generative AI Applications with Ram Sriharsha, CTO at PineconeRegister for RADAR AI - June 26 New to DataCamp? Learn on the go using the DataCamp mobile appEmpower your business with world-class data and AI skills with DataCamp for business

As AI adoption accelerates, many enterprises still face challenges building production-grade AI systems for high-value, knowledge-intensive use cases. RAG 2.0 is Contextual AI’s unique approach for solving mission-critical AI use cases, where accuracy requirements are high and there is a low tolerance for error. 

In this talk, Douwe Kiela—CEO of Contextual AI and co-inventor of RAG—will share lessons learned from deploying enterprise AI systems at scale. He will shed light on how RAG 2.0 differs from classic RAG, the common pitfalls and limitations while moving into production, and why AI practitioners would benefit from focusing less on individual model components and more on the systems-level perspective. You will also learn how Google Cloud’s flexible, reliable, and performant AI infrastructure enabled Contextual AI to build and operate their end-to-end platform.

In this session, Douwe Kiela, the CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI and an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, will talk about how Contextual AI is building the next generation of language models leveraging Google Cloud. He will dive deeper into why retrieval augmented generation (RAG; which he pioneered at Facebook) is the dominant paradigm for large language model (LLM) deployments and the role he believes RAG will play in the future of gen AI.

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