A Hacker News submission today points to Sergey Filimonov’s January 15 walkthrough on ingesting millions of PDFs using Gemini 2.0 Flash. Commenters say Gemini’s multimodality and large context window make document ingestion simpler and cheaper.

The Hacker News thread draws competing views about software. One fintech engineer reported replacing a dedicated OCR vendor with Gemini, cutting processing time from 12 minutes to 6 seconds while accuracy was like 96% of that of the vendor at significantly lower cost. Another commenter predicting that legacy vendors ‘focusing on a specific type of PDF is going to get obliterated by LLMs.’ Others argued that the non-digital portions of business processes change at people and org speed, not AI speed.

The debate extended to whether LLMs themselves are a commodity or a platform shift. One commenter described the current VC-software-ecosystem as ‘the walking dead,’ while others argued that vendor lock-in would simply shift from OCR companies to LLM providers. The thread sits at 1303 points and 447 comments, suggesting this is a live nerve for developers building data pipelines.