pdlug/itty-bitty-rag

A tiny Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system in TypeScript

Itty Bitty RAG

A tiny demonstration of a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system in TypeScript. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the bare bones of a RAG system. No attempts have been made to make this robust, efficient, or scalable.

LanceDB is used as the vector database. OpenAI is used for the embeddings (text-embedding-3-small) and generating responses (gpt-4o).

The example dataset provided is a collection of transcripts from the Lex Fridman Podcast generated using Deepgram. There are 119 transcripts in the dataset, and they are quite long, resulting in a total of approximately 4,052,586 tokens. See the section Indexing a subset of the data below if you want to run this faster on a subset of the data.

If you'd like to skip building the LanceDB database you can download it from here: ittybittyrag.lancedb.zip (26MB download, 42MB uncompressed). Just unzip it in the root directory of this project.

Usage

pnpm install

Add your OpenAI API key to .env:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Index the data:

pnpm run ingest

Do a search:

pnpm run search "What was said about physics?"

Indexing

The ingest.ts script ingests transcripts from the transcripts directory and indexes them in a LanceDB database.

1. Load data
2. Convert data to text
3. Split text into chunks
4. Create embeddings for each chunk
5. Index embeddings in a vector database

Search

The search.ts script takes a query and searches the vector database for relevant chunks, addes them to the prompt context, and passes the prompt to the LLM.

1. Take a query
2. Generate an embedding for the query
3. Retrieve relevant chunks from the vector database
4. Feed the chunks into the LLM prompt
5. Generate a response

Misc

Indexing a subset of the data

Edit the ingest.ts script to only index a subset of the data by changing this line:

for (const file of files) {

to this (substitute 10 for the number of files you want to index):

for (const file of files.slice(0, 10)) {