RAG isn't always fast enough or intelligent enough for modern agentic AI workflows. As teams move from short-lived chatbots to long-running, tool-heavy agents embedded in production systems, those limitations are becoming harder to work around.In response, teams are experimenting with alternative memory architectures — sometimes called contextual memory or agentic memory — that prioritize persistence and stability over dynamic retrieval.One of the more recent implementations of this approach is "observational memory," an open-source technology developed by Mastra, which was founded by the engineers who previously built and sold the Gatsby framework to Netlify.Unlike RAG systems that retrieve context dynamically, observational memory uses two background agents (Observer a [...]
For all their superhuman power, today’s AI models suffer from a surprisingly human flaw: They forget. Give an AI assistant a sprawling conversation, a multi-step reasoning task or a project spanning [...]
A rogue AI agent at Meta passed every identity check and still exposed sensitive data to unauthorized employees in March. Two weeks later, Mercor, a $10 billion AI startup, confirmed a supply-chain br [...]
It has become increasingly clear in 2025 that retrieval augmented generation (RAG) isn't enough to meet the growing data requirements for agentic AI.RAG emerged in the last couple of years to bec [...]
Something shifted in enterprise RAG in Q1 2026. VB Pulse data spanning January through March tells a consistent story: the market stopped adding retrieval layers and started fixing the ones it already [...]
A core element of any data retrieval operation is the use of a component known as a retriever. Its job is to retrieve the relevant content for a given query. In the AI era, retrievers have been used a [...]
The vector database category is undergoing a shift in response to the needs of agentic AI. The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-to-vector database pipeline doesn't cut it anymore; agentic AI [...]
Google senior AI product manager Shubham Saboo has turned one of the thorniest problems in agent design into an open-source engineering exercise: persistent memory.This week, he published an open-sour [...]