Is the text flattened? You don't need to run PDFs through OCR if not. The text can be extracted. Even with JavaScript in the web browser. You only need OCR for hand written text or flatted text. Google's document parse can help as well. You could also run significantly cheaper tools on the PDF first. Just sending everything to the LLM is more costly. What about massive PDFs? They won't fit in the context window sometimes or will cost a lot.
LLMs are great, but use the right tool for the job.
Our argument in general is that even in the non-flattened cases, we see complex diagrams pop up in documents that won't work with a text-based approach.
In the context of RAG, the objective is to send information to the model, so LLMs are the right tool for the job.
LLMs are great, but use the right tool for the job.