A company is building a generative AI chatbot for customer support using Vertex AI. They want to ground the model responses with their internal knowledge base stored in Cloud Storage and BigQuery. Which feature should they use to ensure the model only answers from the provided data and avoids hallucination?
Vertex AI Grounding with Vertex AI Search connects the model to your Cloud Storage and BigQuery repositories, retrieving relevant passages before generation. This retrieval-augmented approach constrains responses to indexed enterprise content, satisfying the requirement that answers derive solely from the internal knowledge base and reducing hallucination.
Why this answer
Vertex AI Grounding with Vertex AI Search is the correct feature because it allows the model to retrieve and cite information from a specified data source (such as Cloud Storage and BigQuery) to generate responses. This process, known as grounding, ensures the model's output is based solely on the provided authoritative data, effectively reducing hallucinations by constraining the model to factual, retrieved content rather than relying on its internal parametric knowledge.
Exam trap
The trap here is that candidates may confuse Vertex AI Prediction (a general model serving endpoint) with the grounding feature, mistakenly thinking that simply deploying a model with Vertex AI Prediction will automatically restrict its answers to a specific knowledge base, when in fact grounding requires explicit integration with Vertex AI Search and a configured data store.
How to eliminate wrong answers
Option B is wrong because Vertex AI Prediction is a service for deploying and serving models to generate predictions or responses, but it does not inherently include grounding capabilities to restrict answers to a specific knowledge base; it would require additional integration with a retrieval system. Option C is wrong because Vertex AI Pipelines is an orchestration service for building and managing ML workflows, not a feature for grounding model responses or preventing hallucinations. Option D is wrong because Cloud Functions is a serverless compute service for running event-driven code, and while it could be used to build a custom retrieval pipeline, it is not a native Vertex AI feature for grounding and does not provide the built-in retrieval and citation mechanisms needed to ensure answers come only from the provided data.