[Hands-on] Make RAG systems 32x memory efficient!

There’s a simple technique that’s commonly used in the industry that makes RAG ~32x memory efficient!

• Perplexity uses it in its search index
• Azure uses it in its search pipeline
• HubSpot uses it in its AI assistant

To learn this, we’ll build a RAG system that queries 36M+ vectors in <30ms.

And the technique that will power it is called Binary Quantization.

Tech stack:

• Llama Index for orchestration (open-source).
• ​Milvus​ as the vector DB (open-source).
• ​Beam Cloud​ for serverless deployment (open-source).
• Kimi-K2 as the LLM hosted on Groq (hosted).

Here's the workflow:

• Ingest documents and generate binary embeddings.
• Create a binary vector index and store embeddings in the vector DB.
• Retrieve top-k similar documents to the user's query.
• LLM generates a response based on additional context.

Let's build it!

Setup Groq

Before we begin, store your Groq API key in a .env file and load it into your environment to leverage the world's fastest AI inference.

Load data

We ingest our documents using LlamaIndex's directory reader tool.

It can read various data formats including Markdown, PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint decks, images, audio, and video.

Generate Binary Embeddings

Next, we generate text embeddings (in float32) and convert them to binary vectors, resulting in a 32x reduction in memory and storage.

This is called binary quantization.

Vector indexing

After our binary quantization is done, we store and index the vectors in a Milvus vector database for efficient retrieval.

Indexes are specialized data structures that help optimize the performance of data retrieval operations.

Retrieval

In the retrieval stage, we:

• Embed the user query and apply binary quantization to it.
• Use Hamming distance as the search metric to compare binary vectors.
• Retrieve the top 5 most similar chunks.
• Add the retrieved chunks to the context.

Generation

Finally, we build a generation pipeline using the Kimi-K2 instruct model, served on the fastest AI inference by Groq.

We specify both the query and the retrieved context in a prompt template and pass it to the LLM.

Deployment with Beam

​Beam​ provides ultra-fast serverless deployment of any AI workflow. It is fully open-source, and you can self-host it on your premises (​GitHub repo​).

Thus, we wrap our app in a Streamlit interface, specify the Python libraries, and the compute specifications for the container.

Finally, we deploy the app in a few lines of code

Run the app

Beam launches the container and deploys our streamlit app as an HTTPS server that can be easily accessed from a web browser.

Moving on, to truly assess the scale and inference speed, we test the deployed setup over the PubMed dataset (36M+ vectors).

Our app:

• queried 36M+ vectors in <30ms.
• generated a response in <1s.

Done!

We just built the fastest RAG stack leveraging BQ for efficient retrieval and using ultra-fast serverless deployment of our AI workflow.

​Beam GitHub repo →​

​Milvus docs on Binary Quantization →​

​You can find the code for today’s demo here →

Thanks for reading!