A smaller model for a mountain of paperwork.

H Company introduced NeoMME on September 3: a family of smaller models for working with text, images and multiple languages. The release includes 260-million and 800-million-parameter versions, with checkpoints under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The retrieval version treats document pages as images. That keeps charts, tables and page layout in the search process, instead of depending entirely on text extracted from the page. One transformer processes both text and image patches.

Find the page first

This is retrieval infrastructure, not a general-purpose assistant promising to run the office. The company reports competitive results on visual document benchmarks at relatively compact model sizes. Those results come from its release and deserve testing on documents that were not selected for a demonstration.

Bring your difficult paperwork

Our suggestion: compare it with the search you already use. Include awkward scans, dense tables and mixed-language reports. Count missed answers, response time and the cost of storing the index. The filing cabinet has enjoyed a very long career. It need not be replaced by something equally difficult to search.