One thing I find fascinating as a software engineer who talks to non software engineers who use AI tools is how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem. What I mean is that uploading a PDF into a chatbot tool seems to be an extraordinarily obvious use case that non technical (and technical) users would want to do.

IMO claude, chatgpt/codex, etc should be able to optimize the PDF use case to be extremely token efficient as it's a very obvious use case. But when I start to explain to my wife/friends why it burns through so much quota, I find myself thinking "why should they have to understand this aspect of it". to me, that the details of PDF parsing and extracting are relevant to users (instead of solved such that you don't have to pay attention to it) shows how these tools are not nearly as "ready" as they are made out to be. I may be preaching to the choir on this one, but just my 2c

Because PDFs are a nightmare of a format and the only thing that’s is reasonably guaranteed about them is they will render to an image that people can read, the parsing of which will be much less token efficient than the equivalent text

I hope someday we can get out of this local maxima of PDF documents. The format is terrible, but was right place, right time and might be impossible to dislodge.

You don't need to use an online service to do this; you get to avoid spending money on tokens doing it offline.

Gemma 4 works perfectly well offline on limited hardware (I have an 8GB video card) and can handle extracting text from image-based PDFs just fine.

Take a PDF -> run it through MarkItDown [1], using the OCR plugin if you need (point it to Gemma 4) -> now you can ask Gemma 4 questions about the (markdown) document.

I am sure Gemma 4 could even create a GUI to make this process very simple for a non technical user.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

Amen. Normal office work is wildly different from what we read about on HN. If you were a CEO, determined to lay off all your people, you would want to really zero in on having your AI solve these very unsexy problems: extract data from Office and PDF. Grab data from some part of the screen of a webapp and parse it. drive a line of business app via keyboard or mouse simulation. I know there are companies out there that try, eg Appian and (here in YC) Skyvern, but its a hard problem and yet I feel this is where the true money is.

> how "reading PDFs" is not more of a solved problem

This and replies to this are surreal. It's like everyone simultaneously decided to forget that you don't need claude or whatever to read a PDF. The document is literally made for you to read...

The best way to parse pdfs is to convert them to images and feed them into the llm.

This workflow is highly optimized.

You are missing that the product is the hype cycle around AI and that's worth Trillions of $ (Trillions with a T). Why build a PDF parser that generate text when you can BS in a podcast and get paid.

This discussion was about measures, goals and incentives. Follow the incentives.