4 ms·

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are ve

How impressed or unimpressed you are by it is a direct reflection of yourself and what you are trying to achieve with it. I find zero value in it. Others are very impressed by it, but I'm not very impressed by what they hold up as an example of its output. Sometimes I can only laugh when it's horribly wrong, but they herald it as amazing. The whole thing reminds me of the blockchain hype train. Still using and loving databases here for the foreseeable—still writing things by hand for the foreseeable, and loving every moment.

jiggawatts 3y ago
You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing the thing. It was working, and everything. I made a comment wondering if Chat GPT 4 with the vision extension could solve the same problem. One of the devs that had worked on the aforementioned AI (for years!) mentioned that yes, yes it can. Game over. Those years of effort had just been replaced with a one-sentence English-language prompt that starts with "Please output a table from..." If this doesn't blow your mind, then... I don't know how to help you understand just how much has changed, virtually overnight.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks. Users have even been able to train OmniPage Ultimate to recognize someone's bizarre and unique handwriting styles in seconds. OmniPage Ultimate is an entire workflow that's turn-key and ready-to-go.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Neat? Neat!? Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet. Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries. You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds. A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.: Overview Hardware SKU A2 Zone 2 Software Operating System Windows Image Licensed Yes Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it understands not only what text is likely to be a heading, property, or value... but it has also seen specifically the properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It understands these things to the same level as I do, and can fix up the formatting the same way I would. Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting. Years of effort? Decades?
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      And yet, my default go-to example with me being personally unimpressed with ChatGPT 3 and 4 is getting it to output a valid NGINX configuration without hallucinating, despite feeding it the required documentation, the original Apache .htaccess file, and telling it what URL rewrites would be required. This should not be a difficult thing, but it constantly hallucinates things that aren't there because it's an LLM, and that's what LLMs do, they predict the next word. Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days, and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers", it still didn't give the expected output. It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs, but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust to place in an LLM.
- nluken 3y ago
  So what you're saying is that one piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers can match another piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a different piece of software and hit a button.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    ChatGPT isn't a complete workflow and doesn't even get off the starting blocks for doing what OmniPage Ultimate does. This is like saying you could do CAD via ChatGPT, sure, but it's an objectively crappy experience versus an actual piece of CAD software with an appropriate UX. Using different pieces of software isn't a problem for most adults.
Kim_Bruning 3y ago
It might depend on your workflow. In many workflows (mine included), you tend to start out with a bunch of messy ideas and then slowly polish them into something usable. ChatGPT is a very powerful tool along the way here. It can help organize things, it can help rephrase your thoughts, and it can help solve minor issues along the way. Sometimes it can even do some fairly fancy things that previously could only be done by a human. For now I'd treat it more like a sparring partner who can help you with your ideas and support you throughout your process, rather than a magical genie that can magically solve your problem for you. And in this manner I find it to be very useful indeed.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  Can you give an example on how you organize via ChatGPT? Keep in mind that this is a term I associate with project management systems like Active Collab, note-taking systems like Obsidian.md and OneNote, task managers like MyLifeOrganized, so your idea of what that entails might be quite different.
plumeria 3y ago
Do you have a link to the repo? How does it compare to axcell (which is very domain-specific) [0]. [0] https://github.com/paperswithcode/axcell https://github.com/paperswithcode/axcell

jiggawatts 3y ago

You're not impressed!? Here on HN, a few days ago, there was a post about Microsoft publishing a GitHub repo that contained a "table recognizer AI". Basically, you feed it PDFs that contain horrible scanned images of finance records, and it spits out Excel spreadsheets. For some reason, Microsoft had just "thrown this over the fence" and released it to the public for free. This, despite man-years of effort developing the thing. It was working, and everything. I made a comment wondering if Chat GPT 4 with the vision extension could solve the same problem. One of the devs that had worked on the aforementioned AI (for years!) mentioned that yes, yes it can. Game over. Those years of effort had just been replaced with a one-sentence English-language prompt that starts with "Please output a table from..." If this doesn't blow your mind, then... I don't know how to help you understand just how much has changed, virtually overnight.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
I mean, sure, I guess that's neat, but Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has been a thing for years at this point and does the whole OCR from a crappy scan thing, including reformatting it into whatever format you want. Can even take data from forms and digitize it into editable text or stick it into a database. Goes back to the '80s. Sure, different methodology, but it's not something we haven't already been doing for yonks. Users have even been able to train OmniPage Ultimate to recognize someone's bizarre and unique handwriting styles in seconds. OmniPage Ultimate is an entire workflow that's turn-key and ready-to-go.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Neat? Neat!? Generally speaking, Kofax -- or any other off-the-shelf OCR tool -- can't process tables properly. They get confused by headings, total rows, and the like. Hence the R&D effort by that Microsoft team to develop a purpose-built AI-driven tool that can specifically identify these elements and then output the result not just as ASCII text, but as a spreadsheet. Either way, whether you are talking about the Microsoft AI or the Kofax tool, the effort is measured in man-years, man-decades, or perhaps even man-centuries. You can just ask ChatGPT to do similar tasks for you in seconds. A real-world use case I had for GPT is to fix up the formatting of badly copy-pasted tables. E.g.: I had created a cloud VM and pasted the summary tab into text editor, and only then noticed that the cells ended up on individual rows, interleaved with the headings. Even if I had used a regex to undo the damage, the headings mess up the alternating row interleave. E.g.: Overview Hardware SKU A2 Zone 2 Software Operating System Windows Image Licensed Yes Chat GPT can "undo the damage" because it understands not only what text is likely to be a heading, property, or value... but it has also seen specifically the properties of the type of cloud VM I was working on! It understands these things to the same level as I do, and can fix up the formatting the same way I would. Sit down for a second, and ask yourself: How much time and effort would you have to invest to solve this style of problem, in general. E.g.: given some random, broken table formatting for an arbitrary but well-known subject, fix up the formatting. Years of effort? Decades?
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    And yet, my default go-to example with me being personally unimpressed with ChatGPT 3 and 4 is getting it to output a valid NGINX configuration without hallucinating, despite feeding it the required documentation, the original Apache .htaccess file, and telling it what URL rewrites would be required. This should not be a difficult thing, but it constantly hallucinates things that aren't there because it's an LLM, and that's what LLMs do, they predict the next word. Whilst to the untrained eye, sure, the NGINX config looked great, but it didn't function, and it didn't include the URL rewrites as instructed, hallucinated a bunch of rewrites that didn't exist and would serve no purpose, and despite refining the prompts over many days, and consulting with self-proclaimed "prompt engineers", it still didn't give the expected output. It's neat. Reliable? Not in my experiences for my needs, but I am genuinely glad you're making it work for what you need, that's definitely cool, provided it doesn't hallucinate in an unnoticed capacity. It's a lot of trust to place in an LLM.
nluken 3y ago
So what you're saying is that one piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers can match another piece of software with years of labor from a team of engineers? You're incorrectly comparing the creation of the software with the usage of the software. Yeah, now all you need to do is give ChatGPT the file and prompt it for a solution, whereas before, you... gave the file to a different piece of software and hit a button.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  ChatGPT isn't a complete workflow and doesn't even get off the starting blocks for doing what OmniPage Ultimate does. This is like saying you could do CAD via ChatGPT, sure, but it's an objectively crappy experience versus an actual piece of CAD software with an appropriate UX. Using different pieces of software isn't a problem for most adults.

Kim_Bruning 3y ago

It might depend on your workflow. In many workflows (mine included), you tend to start out with a bunch of messy ideas and then slowly polish them into something usable. ChatGPT is a very powerful tool along the way here. It can help organize things, it can help rephrase your thoughts, and it can help solve minor issues along the way. Sometimes it can even do some fairly fancy things that previously could only be done by a human. For now I'd treat it more like a sparring partner who can help you with your ideas and support you throughout your process, rather than a magical genie that can magically solve your problem for you. And in this manner I find it to be very useful indeed.

hammyhavoc 3y ago
Can you give an example on how you organize via ChatGPT? Keep in mind that this is a term I associate with project management systems like Active Collab, note-taking systems like Obsidian.md and OneNote, task managers like MyLifeOrganized, so your idea of what that entails might be quite different.

plumeria 3y ago

Do you have a link to the repo? How does it compare to axcell (which is very domain-specific) [0]. [0] https://github.com/paperswithcode/axcell https://github.com/paperswithcode/axcell