# Reducto CEO Adit Abraham on why PDFs still break AI

> Original title: In this episode, @reductoai co-founder and CEO @aditabrm joins @allenpark to make steak sandwiches with burrata, torched peaches, and chi...

- Source: Latent.Space
- Published: 2026-11-06T20:19:00.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/e1zpvyx98maebjo1e5ae77nrh
- Original: https://x.com/latentspacepod/status/2118800336412709024

## Summary

Reducto co-founder and CEO Adit Abraham joins Allen Park on Latent.Space to discuss why PDFs still break AI, including frontier models silently dropping rows and why 99% accuracy can fall short in production. The episode also covers what Reducto learned processing a billion pages a month and what office work would need to reach a Claude Code moment.

## Post

In this episode, @reductoai co-founder and CEO @aditabrm joins @allenpark to make steak sandwiches with burrata, torched peaches, and chimichurri and talk about why PDFs still break AI: how frontier models silently drop rows, why 99% accuracy can still fall short in production, what Reducto learned processing a billion pages a month, and what it would take for office work to have its Claude Code moment.

00:00 Cold Open
00:13 Meet Adit Abraham and the Viral Steak Tweet
00:57 From Remembrall to Reducto: YC and the Pivot 
01:57 Why PDFs Are Still Hard for AI 
03:35 What AI Agents Need to Do With Documents 
04:19 Model Routing for Tricky Pages and Tables 
05:29 Build vs. Buy: When to Train Your Own Models 
07:00 Deep Extract, Frontier Models, and Missing Rows 
08:20 Why Everyone Wins Their Own Benchmark 
09:29 Reducto R1: Accuracy, Cost, and a Billion Pages a Month 
10:57 When 99% Accuracy Isn’t Enough 
13:05 Continuous Evals and Production Failures 
16:49 How Reducto Uses AI Agents Internally 
18:28 Hiring With AI and the Eight-Hour Onsite 
20:17 Early Hires and What Obsession Looks Like 
23:17 Blowtorching Peaches 
24:24 Scaling From a Small Team to Series B 
27:34 Competition and the Data Flywheel 
30:52 What Better Parsing Unlocks for Customers 
32:11 Finding a Cofounder at MIT 
34:34 The Anthropic Hackathon, Long-Term Memory, and RAG 
38:49 From Reading PDFs to Redlining Contracts 
43:19 A Claude Code Moment for Office Work
46:13 What’s Next for Reducto: Extraction, Citations, and Cost 
47:51 Assembling the Steak Sandwich 
49:55 The Steak Allegations and Taste Test

[Video](https://badinfluence.news/api/img-proxy?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg.com%2Famplify_video_thumb%2F2118794827064397824%2Fimg%2Foosfj2VtmXEj3RGW.jpg&mode=thumb&exp=1794268800&sig=f0d341aa05a0a11b)