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A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

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Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#51

Post by shwaj »

orionsbelt wrote: post #47
IAmGraydon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is utterly wrong. Predicting the next word requires a large sample of data made into a statistical model. It has nothing to do with "understanding", which implies it knows why rather than what.

Ilya Sustkever was on a podcast, saying to imagine a mystery novel where at the end it says “and the killer is: (name)”. Saying it’s just a statistical model generating the next most likely word, how can it do that in this case if it doesn’t have some understanding of all the clues, etc. A specific name is not statistically likely to appear

Can current LLMs actually do that, though? What Ilya posed was a thought experiment: if it could do that, then we would say that it has understanding. But AFAIK that is beyond current capabilities.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#52

Post by torben-friis »

throwup238 wrote: post #2

I really hope they have because I’ve also been experimenting with LLMs to automate searching through old archival handwritten documents. I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge. It doesn’t help that they were of…

>I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge

Completely off topic, but out of curiosity, where are you reading these documents? As a Spaniard I’m kinda interested.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#55

Post by ghm2199 »

I just used AI studio for recognizing text from a relative's 60 day log of food ingested 3 times a day. I think I am using models/gemini-flash-latest and it was shockingly good at recognizing text, far better than ChatGPT 5.1 or Claude's Sonnet (IIRC its 4.5) model.

https://pasteboard.co/euHUz2ERKfHP.png

Its response I have captured here https://pasteboard.co/sbC7G9nuD9T9.png is shockingly good. I could only spot 2 mistakes. And those that seems to have been the ones even I could not read or was very difficult for me to make out what the text was.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#56

Post by nl »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #41
energy123 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting the next word requires understanding, they're not separate things. If you don't know what comes after the next word, then you don't know what the next word should be. So the task implicitly forces a more long-horizon understanding of the future sequence.

This is utterly wrong. Predicting the next word requires a large sample of data made into a statistical model. It has nothing to do with "understanding", which implies it knows why rather than what.

Modern LLMs are post trained for tasks other than next word prediction.

They still output words through (except for multi-modal LLMs) so that does involve next word generation.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#57

Post by CamperBob2 »

testaccount28 wrote: post #42
jstummbillig wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remain confused but still somewhat interested as to a definition of "novel", given how often this idea is wielded in the AI context. How is everyone so good at identifying "novel"? For example, I can't wrap my head around how a) a human could come up with a piece of writing that inarguably reads "novel" writing, while b) an AI could be guaranteed to not be able to do the same, under the same standard.

why would you admit on the internet that you fail the reverse turing test?

You have no idea if you're talking to an LLM or a human, yourself, so ... uh, wait, neither do I.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#58

Post by neom »

I've been complaining on hn for some time now that my only real test of an LLM is that it can help my poor wife with her research, she spends all day every day in small town archives pouring over 18th century American historical documents. I thought maybe that day had come, I showed her the article and she said "good for him I'm still not transcribing important historical documents with a chat bot and nor should he" - ha. If you wanna play around with some difficult stuff here are some images from her work I've posted before: https://s.h4x.club/bLuNed45

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#59

Post by ghm2199 »

ghm2199 wrote: post #55

I just used AI studio for recognizing text from a relative's 60 day log of food ingested 3 times a day. I think I am using models/gemini-flash-latest and it was shockingly good at recognizing text, far better than ChatGPT 5.1 or Claude's Sonnet (IIRC its 4.5) model. https://pasteboard.co/euHUz2ERKfHP.png Its response I have captured here https://pasteboard.co/sbC7G9nuD9T9.png is shockingly good. I could only spot 2 m…

I basically fed it all 60 images 5 at a time and made a table out of them to correlate sugar levels food and colocate it with the person's exercise routines. This is insane.

Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition

#60

Post by Footprint0521 »

throwup238 wrote: post #2

I really hope they have because I’ve also been experimenting with LLMs to automate searching through old archival handwritten documents. I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge. It doesn’t help that they were of…

Bro split that up, use LLMs for transcription first, then take that and translate it
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