How many chunks should a RAG pipeline retrieve per query?

Tanishka says the number of retrieved chunks, k, is decided empirically. People generally start with 5 or 10, but there is no fixed figure: it depends on the use case and on how the chunks were made. Chunk size itself is a choice too, with Tanishka giving 800 or 1,000 characters as typical starting points.

• The same embedding model must be used for the document chunks and for the user's query.

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Gaurav Sen (2026-09-22). Read the whole episode summary →

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