All posts tagged: retriever

The pet I’ll never forget: Otto, the wild, people-loving golden retriever who had 20 volunteer dog walkers | Life and style

The pet I’ll never forget: Otto, the wild, people-loving golden retriever who had 20 volunteer dog walkers | Life and style

Published by Sam Flores

When we bought Otto, a golden retriever, a year after the death of our previous dog Bertie, we were sceptical that he could live up to our high expectations. What quickly became apparent, during the routine humiliation of our puppy training classes, was that Otto was a law unto himself. “He’s not normal” quickly became a stock family phrase, as Otto demonstrated a series of wild, mischievous and outlandish behaviours. During classes, I remember being told euphemistically that he was “wilful” and shamefully resorted to hiding cocktail sausages in my pockets during the final exam to encourage a modicum of civility in him. It just about worked. He was very hairy, with astonishingly soft ears and a tail that was constantly swishing with delight. Other dogs might gently curl up on the sofa; Otto would sit like a human on his rump, two paws up in the air. Other dogs would splash in the water; Otto would submerge and roll. Other dogs retrieved Frisbees; Otto found dead badgers. The resident court jester in our neighbourhood, …

Databricks’ Instructed Retriever beats traditional RAG data retrieval by 70% — enterprise metadata was the missing link

Databricks’ Instructed Retriever beats traditional RAG data retrieval by 70% — enterprise metadata was the missing link

Published by skeptic

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 as part of RAG pipelines. The approach is straightforward: retrieve relevant documents, feed them to an LLM, and let the model generate an answer based on that context. While retrieval might have seemed like a solved problem, it actually wasn’t solved for modern agentic AI workflows. In research published this week, Databricks introduced Instructed Retriever, a new architecture that the company claims delivers up to 70% improvement over traditional RAG on complex, instruction-heavy enterprise question-answering tasks. The difference comes down to how the system understands and uses metadata. “A lot of the systems that were built for retrieval before the age of large language models were really built for humans to use, not for agents to use,” Michael Bendersky, a research director at Databricks, told VentureBeat. “What we found is that in a lot of cases, the …

Golden retriever and human behaviour may be linked by the same genes – new research

Golden retriever and human behaviour may be linked by the same genes – new research

Published by skeptic

Humans have probably shared their homes with dogs ever since they first settled. So it could be argued that there is no such thing as “human society” without including animals as part of it. Our long shared history with dogs has even be described as a form of co-evolution. And a new study my colleagues at Cambridge and I published shows golden retrievers and humans seem to share a genetic basis for at least some behaviour. Dogs show many adaptations that might help them live and co-operate with people. Ancient humans may even have been selected dogs’ ancestors for an ability to eat a more human diet than wolves. At a psychological level there are many adaptations that aid communication between the two species, like an ability to follow human gestures such as pointing, that exceeds that of our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Dogs also appear to be exceptionally skilled at responding appropriately to human emotion. But it is not all one sided. Humans seem to show an intuitive understanding of the nature of dogs’ vocalisations. …