I have family members with health conditions that require periodic monitoring. For some tests, a phlebotomist comes home. For some tests, we go to a hospital. For some other tests, we go to a specialized testing center. They all give us PDFs in their own formats. I manually enter the data to my spreadsheet, for easy tracking. I use LLMs for some extraction, but they still miss a lot. At least for the foreseeable future, no LLM will ever guarantee that all the data has been extracted correctly. By "guarantee", I mean someone's life may depend on it. For now, doctors take up the responsibility of ensuring the data is correct and complete. But not having to deal with PDFs would make at least a part of their job (and our shared responsibilities) easier.

Can you elaborate? Are you never reading papers directly but only using Gemini to reformat or combine/summarize?

Files.

Truth in general, if we aren't careful.

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Seriously. More people need to wake up to this. Older generations can keep arguing over display formats if they want. Meanwhile younger undergrad and grad students are getting more and more accustomed to LLMs forming the front end for any knowledge they consume. Why would research papers be any different.