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Showing posts with the label LLM eval

Gladych Files Lab Book: Document OCR vs LLM Model vs Cost or Opus is Cheaper than Sonnet for OCR!

I started my lab book entries when I was a physics graduate student. It's kind of amusing and kind of cool how far I've come. I have the equivalent of a grad student, (aka Claude Opus 4.7), working for me now. I spent some time over the weekend setting up an OCR framework for a book research project of mine. I've been coming up to speed on evals, so I decided to run one to determine which model was the most accurate and cost effective for doing OCR on travel manifest pages. I stepped the eval along rather than automating it and talked the results through with Opus as I went.  First, it turns out that Opus at low effort is the most accurate and the most cost effective choice! That was a surprise. The result has to do with Opus' ability to look at higher res images which means it needs to think less for OCR vs. Sonnet. Second, at the end of the eval, as I was preparing to write up my results it occurred to me that I could ask my grad student to do it instead. Here's...