OmniAI OCR benchmark

AI

ocr benchmark

SHOW HN2025

211points
47comments
#295of 3,837 in 2025
Top 8%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

6 positive, 13 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 6 critical, out of 26 comments about the project. Thread score +0.05.

Performance: 3 for, 1 againstPricing: 0 for, 2 againstIdea: 1 for, 0 againstExecution: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Qwen 2.5 VL performs very well on OCR and vision tasks

    From 3 comments
    • I've been very impressed with Qwen in my testing, I think people are underestimating it
      CSMastermind on HN
    • I've been consistently surprised by Gemini's OCR capabilities. And yeah, Qwen is climbing the vision ladder _fast_. In my workflows I often have multiple models competing…
      fpgaminer on HN
    • I wrote a small, client-side-JS-only app that does OCR and TTS on board game cards, so my friends and I can listen to someone read the cards' flavor text. On a few pages of text…
      stavros on HN
  • Benchmark is fully open source with code and dataset

    From 1 comment

Objections

  • Benchmark is run by an OCR vendor that ranks its own product first

    From 2 comments
    • News update: OCR company touts new benchmark that shows its own products are the most performant.
      azinman2 on HN
    • The model with the best accuracy in the linked benchmark is "OmniAI" (OP's company) which looks like a paid model, not open source [1]. [1]: https://getomni.ai/pricing
      rustc on HN
  • Open models produce errors in precision for real use

    From 1 comment
    • Its errors are interesting (averaging around one per paragraph). Semantically-correct, but wrong on precision (simple example, the English word "ardour" is transcripted as…
      pmarreck on HN
  • Full benchmark costs are high and provider pricing varies widely

    From 2 comments
    • Reproducing the whole benchmark would be expensive, OmniAi starts at $250/month.
      rustc on HN
    • Yes, I'll add that to the writeup! You're right, initially excluded it because it was really dependent on the providers, so lots of variance. Especially with the Qwen models.…
      themanmaran on HN

Requests

  • Add bounding box support to the benchmark

    From 2 comments
    • I suppose none of these models can output bounding box coordinates for extracted text? That seems to be a big advantage of traditional OCR over LLMs. For applications I'm…
      ks2048 on HN
    • We're also looking to test qwen and other for the bounding box support. Simon Willison had a great demo page where he used Gemini 2.5 to draw bounding boxes, and the results were…
      themanmaran on HN
  • Add cost and latency results

    From 1 comment
    • You mention that you measured cost and latency in addition to accuracy - would you be willing to share those results as well? (I understand that for these open models they would…
      daemonologist on HN
  • Include Surya and MiniCPM models

    From 2 comments

Questions

  • How does Tesseract compare to LLM-based OCR

    From 1 comment
    • Tesseract can manage 99% accuracy on anything other than handwriting. Without being an LLM. Is there an advantage of using an LLM here?
      AndrewDucker on HN
  • Why is Llama 90b priced so high

    From 1 comment
    • One of these things is not like the others. $8.50/1000?? Any chance that's a typo? Otherwise, for someone that has no experience with LLM pricing models, why is Llama 90b so…
      dylan604 on HN

Alternatives named

  • Mistral OCR

    From 1 comment
    • I'm very curious about the results - I've been using mistral-ocr for the last 2 weeks and it worked really well.
      hdjjhhvvhga on HN
  • Tesseract

    From 1 comment
    • Tesseract can manage 99% accuracy on anything other than handwriting. Without being an LLM. Is there an advantage of using an LLM here?
      AndrewDucker on HN
  • Gemini 2.5 Pro

    From 1 comment
    • In addition, gemini Pro 2.5 does really well with bounding boxes, but yeah not open source :(
      kapitalx on HN
  • Doctly

    From 1 comment
    • If you're limited to open source models, that's very true. But for larger models and depending on your document needs, we're definitely seeing very high accuracy (95%-99%) for…
      kapitalx on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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