OCR libraries have undoubtedly improved but LLMs are using the same open source libraries and tools available to anyone… there’s few cases where sending the work through general models is worth it for text conversion. Employees just needed a front end to upload, run something like tesseract behind the scenes, and spit out the result. It’s an egregiously stupid use of resources.
I know a company that burned $100k in tokens after they they let like 50 worker bees using general AI for OCR, simply converting images and PDFs to text.
They didn’t bother to create a skill, or teach the AI how to reuse a shared script so every request resulted in it writing a new python project, pulling libraries, using a frontier model rather than offloading a dumb one etc.
Basically find a business process that happens often and let em at it inefficiently, it’ll happily chew through the budget.
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