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Today, Andrew Ng, one of the legends of the AI world, released a new document extraction service that went viral on X: https://x.com/AndrewYNg/status/189518392

Today, Andrew Ng, one of the legends of the AI world, released a new document extraction service that went viral on X: https://x.com/AndrewYNg/status/1895183929977843970 https://x.com/AndrewYNg/status/1895183929977843970 At Pulse, we put the models to the test with complex financial statements and nested tables – the results were underwhelming to say the least, and suffer from many of the same issues we see when simply dumping documents into GPT or Claude.

moralestapia 2y ago
That's the standard tier of competence you expect from Ng. Academia is always close but no cigar.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  > That's the standard tier of competence you expect from Ng. Academia is always close but no cigar. Academics do research. You should not expect an academic paper to be turned into a business or production overnight. The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR. It took 70 years of non-commercial research to bring us to the very useful multimodal LLMs of today.
  - mattmanser 2y ago
    It's more they had to wait for processing power to catch up. One of my bit older friends got an AI doctorate in the 00s, and would always lament a business would never bother reading his thesis, they'd just end up recreating what he did in a few weeks themselves. It's easy to forget now that in the 90s//00s/10s AI research was mainly viewed as a waste of time. The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades.
    - kilburn 2y ago
      > The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades. You seem to think that joke is out of date now. Many others don't ;)
  - RansomStark 2y ago
    > The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR. You're about a decade off, the Mark 1 Perceptron was created in 1958 [0]. The original paper (A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity) that introduced the idea however was written during WW2 (1943) [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Perceptron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Perceptron [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Ideas_Immanent_in_Nervous_Activity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Id...
- ritvikpandey21 2y ago
  don't be mistaken, andrew's a legend! he's done some incredible work -- google brain, coursera, baidu ai, etc.
- igleria 2y ago
  He might not have business chops, but this seems a bit harsh :/
- tpoacher 2y ago
  And on the other side, there's companies like Theranos, where you think the world will never be the same again, until you actually try the thing they're selling. Full cigar promised, but not even close. Not saying this is the case with the OP company, but if you're ready to make sweeping generalizations about cigars like that on the basis of a commercial blog selling a product, you might as well invoke some healthy skepticism, and consider how the generalization works on both sides of the spectrum. The whole corporation-glorifying, academia-bashing gaslighting narrative is getting very tiring lately.
panny 2y ago
It seems like you missed the point. Andrew Ng is not there to give you production grade models. He exists to deliver a proof of concept that needs refinements. >Here's an idea that could use some polish, but I think as an esteemed AI researcher that it could improve your models. -- Andrew Ng >OH MY GOSH! IT ISN'T PRODUCTION READY OUT OF THE BOX, LOOK AT HOW DUMB THIS STUFFED SHIRT HAPPENS TO BE!!! -- You Nobody appreciates a grandstander. You're really treading on thin ice by attacking someone who has given so much to the AI community and asked for so little in return. Andrew Ng clearly does this because he enjoys it. You are here to self-promote and it looks bad on you.
- ritvikpandey21 2y ago
  we respect andrew a lot, as we mentioned in our blog! he's an absolute legend in the field, founded google brain, coursera, worked heavily on baidu ai. this is more to inform everyone not to blindly trust new document extraction tools without really giving them challenges!
  - panny 2y ago
    >we respect andrew a lot But you're here to dunk on him for clout, right? As always, everone wants to shoot Billy the Kid, even if they have to shoot him in the back.
- yorwba 2y ago
  This is not about some paper Ng published with a new idea that needs some polishing before being useful in the real world. It's a product released by a company Ng cofounded. So expecting production-readiness isn't asking for too much in my opinion.
  - tpoacher 2y ago
    Except it's a video introducing the concept and trying to create buzz around it and inviting people to try it (for free), and providing a link to the page where you can do so. (at least as far as I could tell). So yes, but not really. This is more like when google released the initial android, and offered it to people to try to get feedback. Yes it's not offered as an obfuscated academic paper in a paywalled journal, but implying the video is promoting a half-baked product as production-ready for quick profit just because it's hosted in a proper landing page is a bit of an extreme take I think.

moralestapia 2y ago

That's the standard tier of competence you expect from Ng. Academia is always close but no cigar.

teruakohatu 2y ago
> That's the standard tier of competence you expect from Ng. Academia is always close but no cigar. Academics do research. You should not expect an academic paper to be turned into a business or production overnight. The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR. It took 70 years of non-commercial research to bring us to the very useful multimodal LLMs of today.
- mattmanser 2y ago
  It's more they had to wait for processing power to catch up. One of my bit older friends got an AI doctorate in the 00s, and would always lament a business would never bother reading his thesis, they'd just end up recreating what he did in a few weeks themselves. It's easy to forget now that in the 90s//00s/10s AI research was mainly viewed as a waste of time. The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades.
  - kilburn 2y ago
    > The recurring joke was that general AI was just 20 years away, and had been for the last few decades. You seem to think that joke is out of date now. Many others don't ;)
- RansomStark 2y ago
  > The first neural network, the Mark 1 Perceptron, was invented during WWII for OCR. You're about a decade off, the Mark 1 Perceptron was created in 1958 [0]. The original paper (A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity) that introduced the idea however was written during WW2 (1943) [1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Perceptron https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Perceptron [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Ideas_Immanent_in_Nervous_Activity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logical_Calculus_of_the_Id...
ritvikpandey21 2y ago
don't be mistaken, andrew's a legend! he's done some incredible work -- google brain, coursera, baidu ai, etc.
igleria 2y ago
He might not have business chops, but this seems a bit harsh :/
tpoacher 2y ago
And on the other side, there's companies like Theranos, where you think the world will never be the same again, until you actually try the thing they're selling. Full cigar promised, but not even close. Not saying this is the case with the OP company, but if you're ready to make sweeping generalizations about cigars like that on the basis of a commercial blog selling a product, you might as well invoke some healthy skepticism, and consider how the generalization works on both sides of the spectrum. The whole corporation-glorifying, academia-bashing gaslighting narrative is getting very tiring lately.

panny 2y ago

It seems like you missed the point. Andrew Ng is not there to give you production grade models. He exists to deliver a proof of concept that needs refinements. >Here's an idea that could use some polish, but I think as an esteemed AI researcher that it could improve your models. -- Andrew Ng >OH MY GOSH! IT ISN'T PRODUCTION READY OUT OF THE BOX, LOOK AT HOW DUMB THIS STUFFED SHIRT HAPPENS TO BE!!! -- You Nobody appreciates a grandstander. You're really treading on thin ice by attacking someone who has given so much to the AI community and asked for so little in return. Andrew Ng clearly does this because he enjoys it. You are here to self-promote and it looks bad on you.

ritvikpandey21 2y ago
we respect andrew a lot, as we mentioned in our blog! he's an absolute legend in the field, founded google brain, coursera, worked heavily on baidu ai. this is more to inform everyone not to blindly trust new document extraction tools without really giving them challenges!
- panny 2y ago
  >we respect andrew a lot But you're here to dunk on him for clout, right? As always, everone wants to shoot Billy the Kid, even if they have to shoot him in the back.
yorwba 2y ago
This is not about some paper Ng published with a new idea that needs some polishing before being useful in the real world. It's a product released by a company Ng cofounded. So expecting production-readiness isn't asking for too much in my opinion.
- tpoacher 2y ago
  Except it's a video introducing the concept and trying to create buzz around it and inviting people to try it (for free), and providing a link to the page where you can do so. (at least as far as I could tell). So yes, but not really. This is more like when google released the initial android, and offered it to people to try to get feedback. Yes it's not offered as an obfuscated academic paper in a paywalled journal, but implying the video is promoting a half-baked product as production-ready for quick profit just because it's hosted in a proper landing page is a bit of an extreme take I think.