Document parsing

Automating document work with Long-Horizon AI Agents at LlamaIndex

Automating document work with Long-Horizon AI Agents at LlamaIndex

Jerry, CEO of LlamaIndex, argues that as AI agents move from answering questions to running long-lived workflows, documents become their most important context source. He walks through the evolution from simple RAG to agent harnesses, explains why PDFs are hard to parse, and presents the company's approach to OCR, extraction with grounding, and document search. He closes by outlining unsolved problems: agent-native document formats, in-place editing, versioning, distilling frontier workflows into cheaper models, and long-horizon background agents.

Grep or Embeddings? Agentic Search Over Company Documents — George He, LlamaIndex

Grep or Embeddings? Agentic Search Over Company Documents — George He, LlamaIndex

George He, head of engineering at LlamaIndex, explores when agents need pre-indexed vector search and when plain file traversal with grep is enough. He contrasts Claude Code's embedding-free approach on code with the harder reality of large, messy, multimodal, permissioned company documents, and proposes a harness of hybrid retrieval, metadata filtering, grep, and reading tools backed by LlamaParse and LiteParse. The talk closes with a live demo of an agent building a cash-flow table from 135 Alphabet filings, grounded in source files.

Skill issue: stop deploying vision language models, use them with Skills — Merve Noyan, Hugging Face

Skill issue: stop deploying vision language models, use them with Skills — Merve Noyan, Hugging Face

Merve Noyan discusses the pitfalls of directly using large Vision Language Models (VLMs) at runtime due to performance limitations and restrictive licensing. She introduces "Web Vision," a toolkit that enables efficient training of smaller, task-specific computer vision models using a novel "vibe training" methodology. This approach leverages VLMs for initial labeling and judgment, followed by training efficient models like RF-DETR, all while adhering to Apache 2.0 licenses and costing only a few dollars.