How to implement Q&A against your documentation with GPT3

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Jan/13/semantic-search-answers/

• Run a text search (or a semantic search, described later) against your documentation to find content that looks like it could be relevant to the user’s question
• Grab extracts of that content and glue them all together into a blob of text
• Construct a prompt consisting of that text followed by “Given the above content, answer the following question: ” and the user’s question
• Send the whole thing through the GPT-3 API and see what comes back

I’ve been calling this the semantic search answers pattern.

Update: Since publishing this post I’ve learned that this technique is known as Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG, as described in this paper from May 2020. I’ve also been pointed to the Question Answering using Embeddings notebook in the OpenAI cookbook which describes this same technique.