@petros What you need is to get rid of the PDFs and deploy an online store.

What is the failure rate of the traditional OCRs compared to the LLMs? And how modern were those OCRs? Modern OCR in the last 5 years or so have a success rate way higher than 90%. And are the failures on OCR itself or interpreting their context (aka knowing how to read the invoice or order, not just identifying the right characters)?

@petros Of course this doesn’t mean you have a tool that assists you with hard and repetitive work. If someone is scanning documents from the VI century for historical preservation, having a tool that helps identifying characters worn out by time, the several aspects of translation and interpretation, etc, might help. But that’s not something that does the job for itself. The historian is the central piece of that puzzle with the necessary knowledge and context for doing it.

@petros I would need more context to know what we’re talking about here. Scanning and OCRing documents? Manually filled forms? Historical docs? If so, I don’t see how “one word wrong out of 10” is in any way acceptable.*

To me automation means something I can set and forget. If I have to verify the work of the “automation”, it’s not automating anything.

Imagine how successful computing would have been if those 40 year old computers I played with they got 10% of their math operations wrong. 1/2

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stroughtonsmith/116030136026775832

This is one of the worst takes from LLM enthusiasts.

Compilers are deterministic, extremely well tested, made out of incredibly detailed specifications debated for months and properly formalized.

LLMs are random content generators with a whole lot of automatically trained heuristics. They can produce literally anything. Not a single person who built them can predict what the output will be for a given input.

Comparing both is a display of ignorance and dishonesty.