LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
13 days ago
- #OCR vs LLMs
- #Document Processing
- #Generative AI
- The traditional OCR and NLP stack is being outperformed by Generative AI like GPT-5.
- OCR technology, dating back to 1870, struggled with human-created documents due to variability in formats, stamps, handwritten notes, and complex layouts.
- Multimodal LLMs (e.g., Gemini-Flash-2.0) have revolutionized fields like image classification and document understanding by leveraging global context and vast training data.
- LLMs can interpret entire documents holistically, including tables, stamps, and handwritten notes, unlike OCR which focuses on pixel-to-text conversion.
- Challenges for LLMs include high costs for processing large documents and limited output context windows, but improvements are expected to make document processing a solved problem soon.
- The author's company, cloudsquid, is working on automating document processing and invites collaboration or discussion.