{"podcast":{"title":"The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)","slug":"twiml-ai-podcast","podcast_index_feed_id":1045879,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/MLN2155636147","website_url":"https://twimlai.com","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/35230150-ee98-11eb-ad1a-b38cbabcd053/image/TWIML_AI_Podcast_Official_Cover_Art_1400px.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"TWIML","episode_count":790,"summary":"Machine learning and artificial intelligence are dramatically changing the way businesses operate and people live. The TWIML AI Podcast brings the top minds and ideas from the world of ML and AI to a broad and influential community of ML/AI researchers, data scientists, engineers and tech-savvy business and IT leaders. Hosted by Sam Charrington, a sought after industry analyst, speaker, commentator and thought leader. Technologies covered include machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural language processing, neural networks, analytics, computer science, data science and more.","last_synced_at":"2026-08-02T15:06:58.791455+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/twiml-ai-podcast"},"episode":{"title":"Is RAG Dead? Lessons from Building AI for Tax Law with Alex Bowcut - #769","slug":"is-rag-dead-lessons-from-building-ai-for-tax-law-with-alex-bowcut-769","published_at":"2026-06-09T19:25:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/twiml-ai-podcast/is-rag-dead-lessons-from-building-ai-for-tax-law-with-alex-bowcut-769","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/twiml-ai-podcast","url":"https://twimlai.com/podcast/twimlai/rag-dead-lessons-building-ai-tax-law","audio_url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/MLN3192814886.mp3","summary":"As context windows grow into the millions of tokens, many AI practitioners are questioning whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is still necessary. If modern models can ingest entire libraries of documents, why bother with retrieval at all? In this episode, Alex Bowcut, Head of Engineering at Sphere, explains why the answer depends on the application. Sphere uses AI to automate global tax compliance—an environment where getting the answer right isn’t enough. Every conclusion must be backed by the correct legal citation, and every decision must withstand expert review. We explore how Sphere built TRAM (Tax Review and Assessment Model), a production AI system that combines retrieval, reasoning models, legal review workflows, reinforcement learning, and deterministic systems to help tax experts move nearly two orders of magnitude faster while maintaining accuracy. Along the way, we discuss why RAG remains critical in high-stakes domains, how Sphere processes legal and regulatory documents from jurisdictions around the world, retrieval architectures, semantic chunking, dense versus sparse retrieval, expert feedback loops, and the challenges of building AI systems that people can actually trust. 🗒️ Full show notes: https://twimlai.com/go/769.","meta_description":"As context windows grow into the millions of tokens, many AI practitioners are questioning whether retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is still necessary…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3092,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/twiml-ai-podcast/episodes/is-rag-dead-lessons-from-building-ai-for-tax-law-with-alex-bowcut-769/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/twiml-ai-podcast/is-rag-dead-lessons-from-building-ai-for-tax-law-with-alex-bowcut-769.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}