What are Data Sources?
======================

All AI-powered software applications require data to perform their jobs.
A significant amount of information is encoded into Large language
models (LLMs) during training, so basic applications may not need
anything other than a user’s input ‘prompt’ to generate useful output.

Creating Data Sources in Gen AI Builder allow you to bring your own data
to use in your AI applications running on Gen AI Builder.

Data Sources are the first step in creating a Gen AI Builder
retrieval-augemented generation (RAG) pipeline. Data Sources allow you
to ingest your own data, and optionally to transform it. You can then
make one or more Data Sources available to your AI applications either
via a :ref:`Accessing Data in a Knowledge Base <Accessing Data in a Knowledge Base>`  or a :ref:`What are Retrievers? <What are Retrievers?>`  .

Gen AI Builder Data Sources ingest your data and store it in your Data
Lake in Gen AI Builder.

.. toctree::
  :maxdepth: 3

  data-sources--getting-started-with-data-sources
  data-sources--create-data-source
  data-sources--refresh-data