Is RAG Dead in 2026? | Build Local RAG from First Principles

Venelin Valkov · Beginner ·🧠 Large Language Models ·1mo ago
Is RAG dead in the age of 1M+ context windows? Absolutely not. In this video, we strip away the frameworks and Vector Databases to build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation system from scratch using Python and first principles. We’ll build a local financial analyst agent using Ollama and Gemma 3, using TF-IDF for retrieval to understand the math behind the magic. AI Academy: https://www.mlexpert.io/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/venelin-valkov/ Follow me on X: https://twitter.com/venelin_valkov Discord: https://discord.gg/UaNPxVD6tv Subscribe: http://bit.ly/venelin-subscribe GitHub repo…
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Chapters (6)

Is RAG Dead in 2026?
1:03 What is Retrieval Augmented Generation?
1:33 Why you still need RAG
4:10 Project setup and RAG pipeline
9:44 RAG demo
12:58 Why simple RAG fails in production
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