Fuck AI

I think if you open up a study, you should and probably need to be specific with the terms. Since llms are just large machine learning models. Just not trained for a single specific use case. You can also achieve very impressive results with small models, you don't need chatgpt 5 for document classification. You can also fine-tune these models for specific tasks and/or "lobotomize" them. But f.e. go with a small qwen model with just 36B parameters or less and you will get very good results. And sure there are the good old OCR methods but you'll need a significant pipeline behind a classic ocr machine. And it would probably still fail to decipher/classify a machine written document with hand written annotations. When you use a decent LLM, it will in most cases be able to differentiate between handwriting & machine letters, it will be able to output both in different variables and it might even be able to put the annotations in context to the original document. And this is an enormous task to program by hand.

And when we talk about speed and sustainability, not every document would be thrown at the expensive model first. But you would build a layered approach, so that 95% of the easy documents would be handled by a cheap and fast solution, but when that has a low confidence, then you would hand the document over to the bigger slower model.

Then add graphs or tables to the document and you'll be nearly completely lost with a classic approach.

I've been working in this field for a couple years, so I speak from personal experience.

But still all those models still have an issue with context sizes and you and your business pipeline will fail if you don't know the boundaries of what's possible today. For the most high profile cases there should always be a human in the loop. Do companies do that? Most likely not, but they can get in big trouble if they make a critical mistake, at least in Europe, can't speak for the wild West/US.

Note: You can self host qwen3.6 with 32gb or better 64gb and play it. It is shockingly good.

Data gathering and theft of IP is a completely different topic. But "luckily" many people now upload their data for free, directly to one of the big hosting companies. But privacy is also a different topic.

So again, be very specific if you choose your topic.