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Give an LLM the text of a PDF document. Ask the model to extract values in the document or in tables. Input the values into a spreadsheet. This is at minimum a
by humansareok1 3y ago
Give an LLM the text of a PDF document. Ask the model to extract values in the document or in tables. Input the values into a spreadsheet. This is at minimum a task which costs companies around the world Hundreds of Millions of dollars a year.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agowhat you're describing is automation and companies have been doing it for years.
- NewJazz 3y agoYeah I'd love to see the results... If anything if there is a multimillion dollar benefit on the table one might argue that companies should publish this data in a more useful format. But no, let's bandaid over outdated practices like PDF-only data and burn GPU cycles to do it, with 92% accurate results.
- humansareok1 3y agoIf it replaces hundreds or thousands of man-hours of expensive labor then yes lets do it.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoA lot of things don’t require 100% accuracy, and raging against the worlds outdated practices doesn’t solve problems faced in the immediate present - and after spending 30 years of my career rating at those practices to absolutely no meaningful effect, a more effective bandaid that has a semantic understanding of the content is probably as good as you get. And GPU cycles are meant to be wasted.
- joquarky 3y ago"Should" is just a curse word. Be the change.
- NewJazz 3y agoLol I just don't read those PDFs. They are probably generated by shoddy automated tooling anyway. Garbage in, garbage out.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoA lot of garbage encodings encode valuable information and resilient systems follow postels law, even if you personally do not.
- humansareok1 3y agoHaving worked on this directly and used basically every other piece of "automation" software available to do this, I can tell you that the GenAI solution is far superior. It's not close.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agobecause apparently somehow ChatGPT magically knows what you're trying to extract. Oh it doesn't? odd that. ChatGPT cannot make judgement calls like what you're trying to imply it can. ChatGPT can do some really cool things, but it's not magic.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoIf you tell a multi modal LLM to extract and structure the contents of a PDF it will absolutely be able to do that successfully. Further, they display a surprising ability at abductive “reasoning” (acknowledging of course they don’t reason at all), and are thus able to make pretty reasonable assumption given the semantic context of a request. Unlike traditional extraction tools that require very specific tuning and are very fragile to structural changes in layout, LLMs tend to be very resilient to such things.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agowhat are you extracting?
- aurareturn 3y agoJust go use GPT4 and try it. You keep repeating the same rhetoric that it doesn’t work but people have made it work, including myself.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoI pay for GPT4 enterprise, try again, only this time answer the question.
- joquarky 3y agoThis sort of bespoke automation ~~is~~ was expensive.