By now there seem to exist many different llms that perform almost as good as OpenAI’s gpt 3.5.

But what is the sota of adopting llms for the use with custom or „live“ data?

I know OpenAI has function calling, and a vector db like pinecone can somehow be used as a knowledge base to introduce more context to the query, or response.

Are there other methods to make the open source llms more useful if you have a huge amount of data?