But only if it could do it with reasonable accuracy. The problem is that AI is one of the few technologies that doesn't just fail to do it's job but it fails and you might never notice until the error is already very costly if it hallucinated something crazy.

Surely this is still a massive problem for any real world enterprise use case unless you throw a human in the loop (which kills the productivity benefit) or you stamp a massive disclaimer on the output

Well, this thing I’m doing isn’t good enough for an audit or the like, but it’s good enough for sanity checking the budget and flagging things for further checking. And without the AI, you just wouldn’t do it at all, because it would take weeks to write a “parser” for these PDFs.

Actually, it doesn’t even need PDFs. It works just about as well if you just feed it PNGs of the pages. Crazy.

>AI is one of the few technologies that doesn't just fail to do it's job but it fails and you might never notice until the error is already very costly if it hallucinated something crazy.

Because this is what is used to deal with non-formal and unstructured data, if you build something that would be always accurate to the task, then you would have solved it formally.

Giving an LLM any task involving numbers is quite a gamble. Still, I guess structuring content is exactly where I assume many practical applications lie, perhaps just as a preprocessor. You just need a way to validate the results...