Why isn't traditional RAG enough for complex questions?
Traditional RAG assumes one retrieval pass will surface everything needed to answer the question, and treats the retrieved documents as ground truth without any effort to verify or reconcile them against each other. Multi-hop questions — where the answer to sub-question two depends on the answer to sub-question one — routinely break this assumption, since you can't know what to retrieve for step two until step one is answered.
Answered in
RAG vs Agentic RAG: Why Retrieval Needed to Become a DecisionTraditional RAG retrieves once and answers. Agentic RAG lets the system decide what to retrieve, from where, and whether the first answer was even good enough.
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