RAG Deserves an Index: Why Ingest-Time Compilation Beats Query-Time Interpretation
Nearly every retrieval-augmented question-answering system in production ships with a hidden interpreter: on each query a language model re-derives the meaning of raw corpus text and then throws that work away. Cheaper models do not close the gap: per-token prices have fallen by orders of magnitude while inference spend has risen, because context volume grows faster than prices fall. This is the modern equivalent of the full-table scan, and the remedy is the one databases found fifty years ago: do the expensive work once, at write time, into a maintained structure that makes reads cheap. A corpus whose read pattern is known before it ever meets a user can and should be indexed too. We cal...
| Authors | Kyle Wild, Yusuke Takahashi, Asako Uraki |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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