Free Lesson

RAG isn't dead. It's sleeping.

Hosted by Doug Turnbull (Maven) and Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Fri, Aug 28, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Cheat at Search with Agents
Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

What is RAG? And why you should still care

How RAG fits into the retrieval landscape. What problem does RAG solve?

RAG's building blocks

How chunking helps LLMs and retrieval manage context. How embedding retrieval and BM25 work.

Why RAG isn't dead

In a world of agentic search, classic RAG hasn't actually gone anywhere.

Why this topic matters

If you follow online AI chatter, you've heard that "RAG is dead". We're all just giving our agents grep now. Mature retrieval doesn't move the dial. In this talk, we'll walkthrough the building blocks and contextualize where RAG sits in a suite of solutions ranging from classic question answering to agentic search. When it's a better choice for managing context.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull (Maven)

Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?

Hugo Bowne-Anderson

AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students

Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data and AI consultant who has advised and taught teams building AI-powered systems, including engineers from Netflix, Meta, and Amazon. He hosts Vanishing Gradients and has written for Harvard Business Review and VentureBeat. Previously Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds, he has also taught at Yale University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, SciPy, and PyCon.

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