In Q3 2024, 72% of production RAG pipelines failed to meet p99 latency SLAs for multimodal queries, according to a Datadog survey of 1,200 engineering teams. Most blamed fragmented toolchains for text and image retrieval—until Stable Diffusion 3.0’s embedding API and Llama 4’s 1M-token context window changed the game. This is the definitive guide to building unified multimodal RAG pipelines that c
When you have 5 unrelated questions, should you pack them into one message to the LLM, or send 5 requests simultaneously? Which is faster? Splitting into multiple independent parallel requests is almost always faster. This isn't a gut feeling — it's determined by the underlying inference mechanism of LLMs. Let's walk through the reasoning from first principles. To understand this problem, you firs