Retrieval: giving it something to read

If the printed book is stale, you can still go get a fresh page and hold it in front of the model. Search a website. Open a PDF. Pull a row from a database and paste the words in. That is retrieval. The model reads what you fetched. Then it talks.

This is easy to mix up with 'the model knows your files.' It does not. Someone, or some small program, went and got the files, turned them into words, and handed the words over. If that fetch is wrong, or old, or from the wrong folder, the model will still sound sure. It only saw what it was given.

Nothing in the world changes when this happens. No email is sent. No form is filed. A wrong retrieval is a wrong reading list, which can still cause trouble if you trust the summary, but it is not the same trouble as a button getting pressed.