← Glossary
Grounding
Anchoring a model's output in specific, verifiable source material instead of letting it answer purely from what it memorized during training.
A grounded response can point to the specific document, record, or data it was generated from — the mechanism behind RAG, but also relevant to any system where an AI's output needs to be traceable back to a real source rather than accepted on faith. The opposite of grounding is an answer that sounds confident but has no verifiable source behind it.
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Where this shows up in practice
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