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Ideas and guides from pin
The failure that should worry you about RAG isn't a missing answer. It's a fluent answer built from the wrong five paragraphs.
How retrieval-augmented generation actually works — chunking, embeddings, hybrid retrieval, re-ranking, context assembly — and the five distinct mechanisms by which it produces a plausible wrong answer instead of an honest 'not found.' Grounded in the published literature, not in a vendor diagram.
When a model explains its reasoning, it isn't reporting what happened inside. It's generating more text.
How inference mechanically works in a modern LLM — the forward pass, the KV cache, sampling, quantization and what each one actually costs — and what interpretability research can and cannot currently tell you about why a model produced an output. Part 2 of our technical-depth series.
The failure that should worry you about OCR doesn't look like garbled text. It looks like 98% confidence and a missing paragraph.
We built our OCR pipeline as a confidence-routed cascade, benchmarked it against three newer document-understanding tools, then threw genuinely dirty scans at it and watched the safety net fail to catch four real bugs. What we found, and what the current literature actually supports.
I didn't start pin because I love legal technology. I'd already watched this exact failure three times.
Grab, Uber, Stripe — three companies, three different products, the same wall: they scaled faster than their own paperwork could follow. Pin exists because the legal industry hit that wall and nobody built the fix.
No answer is better than the reading it came from.
Before a system can answer questions about your case file, someone has to turn the paper into text. That step is called OCR, it never shows up in a demo, and it decides the quality of everything that follows.
Your client trusted you with the case file. Not with your tool's servers.
In May 2025, a New York court ordered the preservation of even the chats users had deleted. The question is no longer what artificial intelligence does with your case file. It's where it ends up, who retains it, and under what rules.