Why we pay AI to undo the failures of PDFs (Introducing UDS 1.0) (opens in new tab)

Most people do not think about file formats. We focus on the words, the contracts, the medical records, and the transactions. The format is invisible, like plumbing or electricity, until it fails. And when it fails in healthcare, legal, or financial systems, the consequences are severe. Right now, we are doing something highly illogical: we take structured database rows, serialize them into static visual coordinates (a PDF), and then pay neural networks and large language models billions of d...