How many AIs does it take to read a PDF?
Last November, the House Oversight Committee had just released 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, and Luke Igel and some friends were clicking around, trying to follow the threads of conversation through garbled email threads and a PDF viewer that was, frankly, "gross." In the coming months, the Department of Justice would release its own batches of files, more than three million of them - again, all PDFs.
This was a problem. While the Department of Justice had run optical character recognition over the text, it was not very good, Igel said, rendering the files more or less unsearchable.
"There was no interface …