Hello everyone! I'm very new to the field, so forgive my primitive question: Do i need a subscription to some hosted service like OpenAI's in order to use llama index for RAG? Or is there a free alternative?
You don't need a subscription, you could use a free vector db such as Chroma db and you will have to use for example openais api for the llm. For embedding the texts to vector embeddings, you could use the free Sentence-Transformers tool.
It's not free but relatively cheap for embedding models and 3.5 turbo. However you can also use the open source LLMs and embedding models instead of OpenAI