Applied AI

Course map · S2 Retrieval and RAG · Episode 4 of 16

Chunking

S2 E4 Explainer · 23 slides · 20 October 2026

  1. Slide 1 of 23, Cover.
  2. Slide 2 of 23, Why it matters.
  3. Slide 3 of 23, Recap.
  4. Slide 4 of 23, Mental model.
  5. Slide 5 of 23, Mental model.
  6. Slide 6 of 23, Ahead of time.
  7. Slide 7 of 23, Ahead of time.
  8. Slide 8 of 23, Method.
  9. Slide 9 of 23, Finding.
  10. Slide 10 of 23, Finding.
  11. Slide 11 of 23, Finding.
  12. Slide 12 of 23, Finding.
  13. Slide 13 of 23, Finding.
  14. Slide 14 of 23, Finding.
  15. Slide 15 of 23, Finding.
  16. Slide 16 of 23, Where it breaks.
  17. Slide 17 of 23, An honest aside.
  18. Slide 18 of 23, Where it breaks.
  19. Slide 19 of 23, For engineers.
  20. Slide 20 of 23, For leaders.
  21. Slide 21 of 23, The scoreboard.
  22. Slide 22 of 23, Decision rule.
  23. Slide 23 of 23, Series map.

Lesson notes

Cutting by section beat every fixed size: structure chunks of 1,024 tokens found the answer passage for 281 of 400 questions, 42 more than E2's cut.

Decision rule

Cut documents along their own structure, then test it on your own questions.

Ideas in this lesson

  • Vectors