Interesting. So this looks like a prediction model, sort of a chatGPT for spreadsheets. Its “[p]retrained exclusively on synthetic data generated from structural causal models (SCMs)”. More or less a clever way of finding the right curve (causal model) to interpolate and extrapolate data in one pass based on artificially clean examples. Only since it is inferred, you will never really know what it used.
I find it hard to imagine reaching for a black box model like this. If you want to predict something important then surely you want to know how the prediction is made to understand how certain it is/ when it will fail etc.
You need to test it for your own use case/data, regardless of you knowing how it works internally or not, at least for important tasks.
ELI5 ?
It’s a machine that tries to guess numbers on a page having looked at lots of pages of numbers before.
So, OCR?
No more like filling in the blanks.