The assistant is never trained on your documents.
It reads them at the moment you ask. This is called retrieval-augmented generation: the documents are searched, the best passages are placed into the assistant’s prompt, and the answer is written from those passages alone, with citations. Each step below has its own page showing exactly what happened for a question.
- Before any question
Documents
Each file is read (including scanned pages), split into short passages that keep their page numbers, and indexed twice: by keyword and by meaning.
Open the library - Step 1
Retrieval
The question is searched against every passage. Keyword matching and meaning matching each rank the passages; the two rankings are merged and the top few are kept.
See the search - Step 2
Augmentation
The chosen passages are numbered and placed into the prompt with the question and the instructions from Settings. This is all the assistant gets to work with.
See the prompt - Step 3
Generation
The assistant writes the answer, citing passage numbers. Every citation is checked against the passages before the answer is shown.
See the answer being written
Ask a question on the Ask page and the three step pages will fill in with what happened.