My wife complains about people complaining about the price of eggs every time the subject comes up because it's her duty as a housewife to know about the price of all the protein sources and they are still a bargain -- who'd have thought that the price of transcribing the receipts would be seen as even more onerous?

Receipt scanning OCR has been around for a long time. Circa 2010 I ran enough HITs on Mechanical Turk [1] that I got my own account representative at AWS and I wondered what other kind of HITs other people were running and thought I would "go native" and try making $100 from Turk.

I am pretty good at making judgements for training sets, I have many times made data sets with 2,000-20,000 judgements; I can sustain the 2000 judgements/day of the median Freebase annotator and manage short burst much higher than that with mild perceptual side effects.

I gave up as a Turk though because the other HITs that were easy to find was the task of accurately transcribing cell phone snaps of mangled, damaged, crumpled, torn, poorly printed, poorly photographed or otherwise defective receipts. I can only imagine that these receipts had been rejected by a rather good classical OCR system. The damage was bad enough I could not honestly say I had done a 100% correct job on any single receipt, as I was being asked to do.

[1] in today's lingo: Multimodal with prompts like "Is this a photograph of an X?" and "Write a headline to describe this image"

There's no way there wasnt a more efficient way of doing this. Way too many tokens per receipt.

I'd wager gemini flash could get decent results. Id be willing to try on 100 receipts and report cost

One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.

You're counting just the egg-having receipts, but there were over 11 thousand receipts they had to go through to get to that 500-ish subset. I'm assuming OP wanted to process all of the receipts and then selected just eggs for a simple analytics job. With your rates, the human would cost almost $2000.

AI has some weird unexpected uses that haven’t been fully uncovered yet, while it fails to scale or match the needed accuracy on expected usecases.

Imagine how many 2001 era eggs he could have bought with that $101

I mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?

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