How do RAGs actually work?

I think I fundamentally misunderstand how RAGs generate output. Everything I've read online seems to suggest that relevant documents are retrieved from a database (with relevance to the prompt calculated based on their embeddings), after which the text of the relevant documents are appended to the prompt's text before being pushed to the LLM for generation.


For some reason, I had it in my mind that the embeddings of the retrieved documents, along with that of the prompt, could be …

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