I agree with you, but every non-engineer I know using these tools 100% will drag and drop a PDF into a chatbot. Anthropic and OpenAI as companies who are selling their products to all sorts of businesses should have a much better means of handling this nightmare of a format because it is so pervasive and so obviously what so many of their customers are going to drop into the product.

Why would they spend a ton of effort ensuring that their customers spend less money on them?

Token economics also are weird. If you design a fancy new frontend that for example uses a cheap model to parse a PDF into text that is fed into an expensive model, you will probably spend more money because you are on API payscale rather than the "max plan" payscale.

> I agree with you, but every non-engineer I know using these tools 100% will drag and drop a PDF into a chatbot

I'm an engineer and use my coding agent to deal with PDFs all the time. It can reach for unix tools if it needs them.

I don't think I understand why this is a problem - it uses tokens, but it removes drudgery. This is the entire promise of the technology.

I’m saying there is basically no way to both make vlms able to understand the long tail of PDFs where the layout conveys information (like charts and tables) and to make it as token efficient as text formats. Current approaches have mostly chosen to work more often than not at the cost of token efficiency.

I think they’ve just decided that vision gives the best results and the token issue will take care of itself.

Once you pay full price for tokens plus margin, it is better for the company to burn as many tokens as possible.

For the same reason as why the oil companies want everyone to use large cars.