Chandra OCR 2, a 4 billion-parameter model from Datalab, outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini on AllenAI’s olmOCR benchmark and a 90-language test while halving the model size. It preserves layout, reads complex tables and math notation, converts diagrams to Mermaid, and runs at two pages per second on an NVIDIA H100. The code is Apache 2.0 but the model weights use an OpenRAIL-M license with commercial restrictions.

• Chandra OCR 2 scores 85.9% on olmOCR vs GPT-4o's 69.9%, while cutting model size from 9B to 4B parameters and hitting ~2 pages/sec on an H100
• Multilingual performance beats Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-5 Mini, with 40-46 point gains on scripts like Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu over Chandra 1
• Weights carry an OpenRAIL-M license requiring a paid commercial license once a company exceeds $2M in funding or revenue, despite Apache 2.0 code
• Handwriting recognition remains weak, dropping to ~50.4% accuracy on complex forms despite strong printed-text and table/math handling

A new open-source OCR model outperformed all major commercial tools on standard text and handwriting tests. It accurately transcribed a 1913 handwritten letter by Ramanujan, preserving layout, math notation, and faint ink details.

• New open-source OCR model (Vision Transformers + glyph-aware training) beat commercial tools like ABBYY and Google Cloud Vision on IFOCR, MLT, and ICDAR benchmarks, with word-error-rates below 1.5%—30-50% better than competitors
• Successfully transcribed a faded 1913 handwritten Ramanujan letter, correctly capturing layout, math notation, and faint ink strokes
• Trained on millions of scanned pages including medieval manuscripts and dense handwritten notes
• Released under Apache license with CPU/GPU deployment scripts, enabling free text extraction from receipts, legal documents, and historical archives without per-page fees