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

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 repository: https://github.com/curiousily/AI-Bootcamp 👍 Don't Forget to Like, Comment, and Subscribe for More Tutorials! 00:00 - Is RAG Dead in 2026? 01:03 - What is Retrieval Augmented Generation? 01:33 - Why you still need RAG 04:10 - Project setup and RAG pipeline 09:44 - RAG demo 12:58 - Why simple RAG fails in production Join this channel to get access to the perks and support my work: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoW_WzQNJVAjxo4osNAxd_g/join #rag #ollama #langchain #chatgpt