Local RAG with Ollama: How to Build a Private AI Chatbot for Your Files
Chat with Your Files: Building a 100% Local RAG System with Ollama Large Language Models (LLMs) are incredibly powerful, but they suffer from two major limitations: they are cut off from data past their training date, and they know absolutely nothing about your private files (like your company's wiki, codebases, or personal PDFs). Feeding this data to online APIs like OpenAI can be a security and privacy nightmare. The solution? **Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)**. And the best part is that you can build one that runs **100% locally** on your own computer, ensuring your data never leaves your hard drive. In this guide, we'll build a private RAG pipeline using **Ollama** and a few lines of Python. ๐ง What is RAG? RAG works by dividing your search query into three distinct phases: Indexing: Your documents are split into small paragraphs (chunks) and converted into numerical vectors (embeddings) representing their semantic meaning, which are stored in a databas...