Cheaper LLM models offer mundane utility

I was playing around with visualizing economic data, and I needed a cheap LLM to digitize or extract text from really old scanned PDFs.

I experimented with Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. It’s a small, ultra-cheap model, but I was surprised by how good it was at extracting clean, high-quality, well-formatted text from really shoddy Indian Meteorological Department PDFs.

It got me thinking: for people working on heavy, dull, repetitive workloads like this, these cheap models unlock a lot of use cases. I’ve seen the same with OpenAI models too. They make it possible to do things that would otherwise be too tedious, expensive, or time-consuming.

I’m imagining someone genuinely interested in archival work. These models can now help people process hundreds or thousands of old PDFs at a really low cost. Hopefully, this unlocks a lot of use cases and brings otherwise undiscovered data, buried in shoddy archives, into the light.