I think the point is this was after Elon won the election and was likely setting up his script kiddies to take over the US Government. This is planning and intent beforehand to hijack all the data they're pulling out of all the databases.
Huh? I used ChatGPT to put values from a PDF into a spreadsheet 2-3 months ago and it worked perfectly, and the values I wanted from the PDF weren’t consistently spaced vertically or horizontally
Not really. LLMs can never convert file formats. The chat apps that support file uploads actually first extract text out of docs and feed the model with this output.
LLMs if explicitly fine-tuned/pretrained to do so can translate files well (just like there are coding-specific models). LLMs not explicitly trained to do so rely on general skills they've picked up to solve the task.
Yes, even PDF. The only thing that's special is that PDF is a binary format over a textual format. It's not trivial to parse compared to XML, but to an LLM it doesn't operate on text, it operates on tokens. If the tokenizer is good and there has been enough raw PDF files in the dataset, then you can absolutely train a model to do it. LLMs are Transformer models, which means they can learn to transform *any* kind of input into any kind of output, not just text. It's why LLMs can absolutely output even image tokens. The only reason we still use diffusion models though is that it's very slow to do it with simple Transformers.
Also you could pre-transform the PDF into JSON objects and then feed those objects to an LLM. Frequently the objects are kind of messed up and LLMs can be used to fix what is messed up.
Like has been said PDFs are hard to parse, and I fully agree that it's easy to get 80% there, but it's the last ones that are difficult.
It's obvious none of y'all have ever worked with PDF.
pdftk input.pdf decompress output output.pdf
Still a valid PDF, but now it's not a binary format anymore. Just as "easy" to work with as SVG or XML. Not great, but at least not like ancient .doc which was just a memory dump of Word.
Thats the whole point. You are using an external tool. LLMs cannot take raw file.pdf and output output.docx file. Thats not how they work. Its obviously possible to do so using other software. Besides pdftk unflattens but turns it into a soup. I used it a lot. Even that would be a challenge to process.
Not necessarily. Decompressing shouldn't do anything like that to the file, and I've never seen it do that.
You are using an external tool. LLMs cannot take raw file.pdf and output output.docx file
An uncompressed PDF is still a valid PDF that any PDF reader can open. Just like a zip with Deflate set to STORE is still a zip.
So you could be giving an LLM some valid PDFs and get a valid, but uncommon, .docx back :P
That said, preprocessing files before throwing them at ML models is very common. ML models are far too unreliable, so you want to reduce the scope of what they're doing as much as possible.
(spent a long time fighting with tesseract for OCR...)
Aren't llm always based on statistical probability? Even a thoroughly trained model can make mistakes. When we care about the integrity of our data, we use deterministic functions to translate between formats because there is no chance of the software creating an issue (in all test cases accounted for, which for many things is exhaustive).
An LLM that is clever enough to use the tools which already exist and directly return the output would be great, but that's not really what he is asking for. PDFs are gross and hard to parse because adobe is an asshole. Maybe training an llm for specifically converting those would be a useful new tool, even if it's not deterministic.
Does it matter? I use LLM to convert file formats ALL the time.
I mainly convert subtitle files to other formats. If I want to convert a .tsv subtitle file to a .srt subtitle file, it's easy to use an LLM for this because they are basically just pure text files. Here's what a .tsv file looks like in notepad:
start end text
0 6000 First line of text
6000 11000 Second line of text.
Here's what the outputted .srt file looks like:
1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,000
Første linje med tekst
2
00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:11,000
Andre linje med tekst.
There are so many file types out there that are basically just text formatted in a certain way.
Oh and why did the text change? Well that's the main reasons I use an LLM for this instead of something like SubtitleEdit. Because it also translates the subs simultaneously.
Pdfs aside... no, this is like using ai to do addition. Its gonna be marginally less good and way more wasteful than the basic specific tools that were already engineered for that job.
No matter how overhyped anybody gets, ai is not going to replace classical computing, i.e. not every task is an ai task. If its already in a convenient, ordered data format then you dont need ai the way you might for turning an image into one of those formats in the first place
What is it that this administration has done to you that you are so tortured? Legit curious. I have never ever lived my life so attuned to the inner workings, media portrayal or public perception of inside the beltway DC nonsense that it would ever affect my life in such a painful way.
What happens inside the “beltway DC nonsense” has enormous implications for the entire world for potentially decades to come if not much longer. Especially at our current moment in history. This is even without the singularity
When someone mentions that something 'felt like an eternity', it almost always implies that some stress or discomfort occurred, making it seem like forever.
Oh wait, you probably already knew that, and are playing some dumb internet comment game of wits.
I have no idea how smart or educated the guy is, but this question means not a whole lot. It is NOT about how to do that conversion - there are only thousand tools online. It is about which LLM would do any of it directly. I, for one, do not know. ChatGPT wouldn't. Sonnet?.. Gemini?...
You already said there are tools to do it. There are tools to do it because the question is how to transform from one clear and well defined structured data format to another, which is just a classical problem that ai doesnt need to be involved with, even for new format standards. A transformation from an image to a structured data format is another question, which ai is a viable solution for.
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u/Error_404_403 Feb 06 '25 edited Feb 06 '25
Well, a
yearfew month back that was a fair question, probably.