Better Embeddings Won’t Fix Missing Provenance in RAG
Part 1 of 6: Building a production retrieval layer, one failure at a time.
Someone asked our internal assistant how much parental leave they were entitled to.
It answered immediately. Clear number, confident tone, and a citation pointing at a real document that really did exist in our wiki — the parental leave policy, exactly the document you would want it to cite.
The number was from 2021. The policy had been revised twice since.
Nobody noticed for three weeks. Not the person who asked, not the three people who asked variations of the same question after them, and not me. There was nothing to notice. The answer was fluent, the citation resolved, the document was genuine. It was wrong in the one way a retrieval system can be wrong without leaving fingerprints.
When I finally traced it, I found something I didn't expect. The embedding model had done its...
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