Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price.
You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.
Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.
One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.
I think at a certain scale we're talking about switching to local trained models which don't have the same operating costs as running a frontier model for OCR. That would reduce the ongoing costs significantly. Might take longer than 30 seconds to read each receipt if you run multiple passes to ensure accuracy, but could run 24/7/365 without the same tax and administration overhead of humans.
Spherical cows aside though, I do agree with you that I should not consider scalability as a given.
I suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.
Apart from the comical cost of extracting this data from paper receipts, is it more likely that stores will publish their product costs over time so trends can be observed or be more like gas stations where no prices are listed. I have no idea why a box of Cheerios costs $7 for processed oats but i see millions of reasons to obscure that data.
I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
I actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up.
Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI.
Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures...
CPI tracks a weighted average of a large basket of different goods, of which eggs are only a small part. It would be extremely surprising if the change in egg prices over time closely matched CPI.
I think they worked that back from tokens used, hence the estimation, but their actual billing was Claude Code & Codex subscriptions. (Which probably was also the main contributor to it taking 14 days.)
You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.
Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.
Spherical cows aside though, I do agree with you that I should not consider scalability as a given.
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
Less than one per day, assuming they're doing groceries only for themselves
There's got to be a "it's a chicken/egg problem" joke in there somewhere, but i'm not seeing it.
Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures...
Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Core CPI (without food + energy prices): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL
I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?
...
> I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like.
At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!