Slashdot: 'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?'

'How Many AIs Does It Take To Read a PDF?'
Published on February 24, 2026 at 12:20AM
Despite AI's progress in building complex software, the ubiquitous PDF remains something of a grand challenge -- a format Adobe developed in the early 1990s to preserve the precise visual appearance of documents. PDFs consist of character codes, coordinates, and rendering instructions rather than logically ordered text, and even state-of-the-art models asked to extract information from them will summarize instead, confuse footnotes with body text, or outright hallucinate contents, The Verge writes. Companies like Reducto are now tackling the problem by segmenting pages into components -- headers, tables, charts -- before routing each to specialized parsing models, an approach borrowed from computer vision techniques used in self-driving vehicles. Researchers at Hugging Face recently found roughly 1.3 billion PDFs sitting in Common Crawl alone, and the Allen Institute for AI has noted that PDFs could provide trillions of novel, high-quality training tokens from government reports, textbooks, and academic papers -- the kind of data AI developers are increasingly desperate for.

Comments

Slashdot: Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year

Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year Published on 2026-08-23T00:29:00Z Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian: The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At least 541 of these fires were directly attributed to lithium ion batteries, the survey found. There were a further 216 battery fires in bin lorries [garbage trucks]. The ESA said the reported number of battery-related fires underestimated the scale of the problem, because in most incidents it was impossible to determine the cause of the blaze. A spokesperson said: "We know 40% of fires at recycling centres are caused by batteries, but we think the actual number is more like 70%." It estimates that annual cost of these fires has increased from ...

Slashdot: How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction

How the FSF Sysadmins are Blocking Botnets with reaction Published on 2026-07-11T21:47:00Z For nearly two years the Free Software Foundation has been fighting web crawlers (including many aggressively scraping training data for AI models). A botnet controlling about five million IPs hit one system for six months in 2025. Their systems administrator wrote this week that they view these as distributed denial-of-service attacks. How are they fighting back? We noticed patterns in the scrapers that were abnormal, which gave us material for writing regular expressions. Searching for the regular expression then gave us a large lists of IP addresses. Looking up the origin of those IP addresses revealed that some of the crawlers were using botnets of residential IP addresses to scrape faster and avoid detection. We looked for what kinds of botnets might be generating the kind of traffic that we were seeing, and one that we suspected was called the "Vo1d" botnet, comprised of sma...

Slashdot: AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age

AT&T Outlines $250 Billion US Investment Plan To Boost Infrastructure In AI Age Published on 2026-03-10T20:00:00Z AT&T plans to invest more than $250 billion over the next five years to expand U.S. telecom infrastructure for the AI age. The company says it will also hire thousands of technicians while partnering with AST SpaceMobile to extend coverage to remote areas. Reuters reports: Rapid adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and connected devices has prompted telecom operators to invest heavily in fiber and 5G networks as they also seek to fend off intensifying competition from cable broadband providers. AT&T, which has about 110,000 employees in the U.S., said the new hires will help build and maintain its infrastructure. The outlay includes capital expenditure and other spending, the company said. The spending will focus on expanding its fiber and wireless networks, including accelerating deployment of fiber broadband, 5G home internet and satellite co...

Shameless Plug

Search This Blog