Is RAG Dead? Lessons from Building AI for Tax Law with Alex Bowcut - #769
RAG remains essential in high-stakes domains like tax law where every answer needs verifiable legal citations.
Alex Bowcut of Sphere argues that despite million-token context windows, RAG stays critical for high-stakes domains because conclusions must be backed by correct legal citations and survive expert review. Sphere's TRAM system combines retrieval, reasoning models, RL, and deterministic checks to accelerate tax experts ~100x while preserving accuracy, signaling that retrieval-grounded architectures still matter for trustworthy, auditable AI.