Comment by postalcoder
Comment by postalcoder 11 hours ago
If we expand this to 3 years, the single biggest shift that totally changed LLM development is the increase in size of context windows from 4,000 to 16,000 to 128,000 to 256,000.
When we were at 4,000 and 16,000 context windows, a lot of effort was spent on nailing down text splitting, chunking, and reduction.
For all intents and purposes, the size of current context windows obviates all of that work.
What else changed?
- Multimodal LLMs - Text extraction from PDFs was a major issue for rag/document intelligence. A lot of time was wasted trying to figure out custom text extraction strategies for documents. Now, you can just feed the image of a PDF page into an LLM and get back a better transcription.
- Reduced emphasis on vector search. People have found that for most purposes, having an agent grep your documents is cheaper and better than using a more complex rag pipeline. Boris Cherny created a stir when he talked about claude code doing it that way[0]