> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? It can definitely do that, but you might not like the cost/benefit analysi

> why can't it read a PDF document and transform it into a machine-readable format? It can definitely do that, but you might not like the cost/benefit analysis, depending on how many such documents you want to process. The costs are coming down steadily though as the tech improves. If you need to do millions of such documents, yeah a model will probably be worth it. But if you need to do a few hundred you probably should just do them manually. The thing is, reality has surprisingly high resolution. When you give out a task like this to a person, they will likely come back to you for clarification about how you want to deal with some of the examples. Your initial requirements will be underspecified, or incorrect, in some details. When you are dealing with a person, these minor adjustments are pretty inconsequential, and so you don't really notice it happening. The worker might also have enough context to guess what you want and not ask, and just tell you the summary when they deliver the work. If you're training a model, you need to work through all these annoying details about what you want, just as you would when you're creating any other sort of program. This adds some overhead, and places a lower bound on how many examples you'll need to have annotated -- you'll always need enough examples of annotation to actually specify your requirements, including various corner-cases. You need enough contact with the data to realise which of your initial expectations about the task were wrong. So there will always be a lower scaling limit, where the automation isn't worthwhile for some small volume of work. The threshold is getting lower but there will always be a trade-off.