I contributed some technical content and opinions to an article titled “WAG (Web-Augmented Generation) for Not Quite Dummies” on the Pure AI web site. See https://pureai.com/articles/2025/11/03/wag-web-augmented-generation-for-not-quite-dummies.aspx.

WAG (web-augmented generation) is quickly becoming an essential part of modern AI systems. WAG allows large language models, such as GPT and Llama, to supplement their core knowledge with additional information by searching the web. This is especially useful when a large language model (LLM) needs recent information, such as a company stock price or a sports score.

I contributed this diagram. It took me longer to make the diagram than it did to implement the code for a complete WAG demo program. I am not a very good illustrator..

LLMs such as GPT from OpenAI, Llama from Meta, Gemini from Google, Claude from Anthropic, R1 from DeepSeek, Grok from xAI, and Mistral AI, are quite remarkable. Because the models have been trained using many data sources, including Wikipedia , the models understand English grammar and know a lot of static facts. But if you want to query for recent information, you need to supply the LLM with the necessary data. One way to do this is to crawl the web for new information.

I am quoted in the article:

The Pure AI editors asked for comments from Dr. James McCaffrey, one of the original members of the Microsoft Research Deep Learning team. “Web-augmented generation makes LLM applications much more powerful, but WAG introduces potential problems,” he said. “Because WAG uses web content, and virtually anyone can post information on the web, WAG systems are susceptible to unintended incorrect information and deliberately poisoned data.

“The openness of the web, and the growing reliance of LLMs for factual content from the web, means that systems designed to verify the correctness of web data will become increasingly important. Keeping humans-in-the-loop to monitor LLM responses for critical systems such as medical and military will also increase in importance.”

The web quickly eliminated newspapers as the primary means of news communication. The web is more efficient than newspapers, but not as entertaining.