Multimodal LLMs vs. Traditional OCR: Which One Wins? — AI Innovations and Insights 40

Glad to have you back for the 40th chapter of this ongoing journey.

Vivid Description

A multimodal LLM is like a Swiss Army knife—versatile and packed with features. It can open bottles, cut wires, and even saw wood (think multitasking).

But when you're trying to tighten a tiny, rusted, oddly-shaped screw with a stripped head—using just the knife’s tiny Phillips screwdriver (low-res, complex Chinese characters, no context)—you quickly realize a precision tool built for that job, like a dedicated OCR model, gets it done better and with less fuss.

Overview

Multimodal LLMs have shown impressive performance in OCR tasks—but when there's little to no context, their true ability to recognize low-resolution or visually complex characters remains unclear. In many cases, their strong contextual reasoning may be masking underlying weaknesses in pure visual recognition.