Comment by voidUpdate

11 days ago

Wouldn't "Serverless OCR" mean something like running tesseract locally on your computer, rather than creating an AI framework and running it on a server?

Serverless means spinning compute resources up on demand in the cloud vs. running a server permanently.

  • ~99.995% of the computing resources used on this are from somebody else's servers, running the LLM model.

  • > Serverless means spinning compute resources up on demand in the cloud vs. running a server permanently.

    Not quite. Serverless means you can run a server permanently, but you need pay someone else to manage the infrastructure for you.

    • You might be conflating "cloud" with serverless. Serverless is where developers can focus on code, with little care of the infrastructure it runs on, and is pay-as-you-go.

      2 replies →

    • Depends if you mean "server" as in piece of metal (or vm), or as in "a daemon"

Thanks for noting this - for a moment I was excited.

  • You can still be excited! Recently, GLM-OCR was released, which is a relatively small OCR model (2.5 GB unquantized) that can run on CPU with good quality. I've been using it to digitize various hand-written notes and all my shopping receipts this week.

    https://github.com/zai-org/GLM-OCR

    (Shameless plug: I also maintain a simplified version of GLM-OCR without dependency on the transformers library, which makes it much easier to install: https://github.com/99991/Simple-GLM-OCR/)

  • When people mentions the number of lines of code, I've started to become suspicious. More often than not it's X number of lines, calling a massive library loading a large model, either locally or remote. We're just waiting for spinning up your entire company infrastructure in two lines of code, and then just being presented a Terraform shell script wrapper.

    I do agree with the use of serverless though. I feel like we agree long ago that serverless just means that you're not spinning up a physical or virtual server, but simply ask some cloud infrastructure to run your code, without having to care about how it's run.

    • > When people mentions the number of lines of code, I've started to become suspicious.

      Low LoC count is a telltale sign that the project adds little to no value. It's a claim that the project integrates third party services and/or modules, and does a little plumbing to tie things together.

Yep. That fraudulent term finally got me this time. Totally serverless except for that remote 3rd party server. Sigh.