Provenance

RAG has a public-relations problem. It promises grounded answers, then quietly assumes that “grounded” means “retrieved from somewhere nearby.” That assumption is convenient. It is also the kind of convenience that creates compliance incidents, medical confusion, and internal knowledge assistants that cite the wrong document with absolute confidence. A retrieval-augmented system can answer from evidence and still choose the wrong evidence. It can cite something real and still fail provenance. ...

Cloud sharing sounds easy until the people sharing it are not one company, not one data center, not one legal jurisdiction, and not even one scientific discipline. Inside a single enterprise, “AI platform” usually means a controlled environment: one cloud vendor, one identity system, one billing model, one preferred deployment stack, and one procurement department quietly pretending this is all strategic. In scientific research, the picture is messier. A climate group may have data in one national infrastructure, compute in another, collaborators across several countries, and privacy restrictions that prevent raw data from moving at all. A bioimaging team may want to publish a model, let others inspect its lineage, deploy it on external infrastructure, and still retain enough metadata for the next researcher to reproduce the result rather than merely admire the abstract. ...