A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
generativehistory.substack.com
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
#2I 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 often written in the field by semi-literate people who misused lots of words. Even the simplest accounts require quite a lot of detective work to decipher with subtle signals like that pound sign for the sugar loaf.
> Whatever it is, users have reported some truly wild things: it codes fully functioning Windows and Apple OS clones, 3D design software, Nintendo emulators, and productivity suites from single prompts.
This I’m a lot more skeptical of. The linked twitter post just looks like something it would replicate via HTML/CSS/JS. Whats the kernel look like?
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#3I 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…
"> Whatever it is, users have reported some truly wild things: it codes fully functioning Windows and Apple OS clones, 3D design software, Nintendo emulators, and productivity suites from single prompts."
Wow I'm doing it way wrong. How do I get the good stuff?
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#4I 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 skeptical that they're actually capable of making something novel. There are thousands of hobby operating systems and video game emulators on github for it to train off of so it's not particularly surprising that it can copy somebody else's homework.
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#5I 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…
Oh! That's a nice use-case and not too far from stuff I have been playing with! (happily I do not have to deal with handwriting, just bad scans of older newspapers and texts)
I can vouch for the fact that LLMs are great at searching in the original language, summarizing key points to let you know whether a document might be of interest, then providing you with a translation where you need one.
The fun part has been build tools to turn Claude code and Codex CLI into capable research assistant for that type of projects.
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#6I 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…
"> Whatever it is, users have reported some truly wild things: it codes fully functioning Windows and Apple OS clones, 3D design software, Nintendo emulators, and productivity suites from single prompts." Wow I'm doing it way wrong. How do I get the good stuff?
Your not.
I want you to go into the kitchen and bake a cake. Please replace all the flour with baking soda. If it comes out looking limp and lifeless just decorate it up with extra layers of frosting.
You can make something that looks like a cake but would not be good to eat.
The cake, sometimes, is a lie. And in this case, so are likely most of these results... or they are the actual source code of some other project just regurgitated.
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#7Author says "It is the most amazing thing I have seen an LLM do, and it was unprompted, entirely accidental." and then jumps back to the "beginning of the story". Including talking about a trip to Canada.
Skip to the section headed "The Ultimate Test" for the resolution of the clickbait of "the most amazing thing...". (According to him, it correctly interpreted a line in an 18th century merchant ledger using maths and logic)
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#8I 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'd love to find more info on this but from what I can find it seems to be making webpages that look like those product, and seemingly can "run python" or "emulate a game" but writing something that, based on all of GitHub, can approximate an iPhone or emulator in javscript/css/HTML is very very very different than writing an OS.
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#9No, just another academic with the ominous handle @generativehistory that is beguiled by "AI". It is strange that others can never reproduce such amazing feats.
Re: A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
#10I’ve seen those A/B choices on Google AI Studio recently, and there wasn’t a substantial difference between the outputs. It felt more like a different random seed for the same model.
Of course it’s very possible my use case wasn’t terribly interesting so it wouldn’t reveal model differences, or that it was a different A/B test.