Notes on document processing with LLMs

One of the recent papers that came across my X feed was a researcher digitizing a corpus of old Sears catalogs to estimate inflation more accurately: The technical skills to do this work are closely related to many of the projects I am working on at Gainwell – large-scale document processing using LLMs. So if you are a PhD student and your thesis involves work like this, I would likely want to hire you for a six-figure job as a data scientist at Gainwell. I wanted to have a quick blog post on some of the tools to process documents. So this researcher processed 180 Sears catalogs that are typically well over 1000 pages, so they likely dropped well over $10k on this project. Like I said in the X post, for this type of volume processing, you shouldn’t be using the main models. You should first consider the cheaper models, like the flash-lite models from Gemini (not even the flash for this), or the mini/nano models from OpenAI. Using these cheaper models, which I suspect would be of…