LightOn releases LightOnOCR-3: 0.8B-4B open-source OCR models under Apache 2.0

IgorCarron · x · 2026-11-08

Quoting a fail where Stanford's AI OCR tool output a 2022 Virgin Galactic press release instead of an Aristotle translation, Igor Carron points to LightOnOCR-3. The new lightweight OCR family comes in 0.8B, 1B and 4B sizes (0.8B/4B built on the Qwen3.5 VLM architecture), with major speed and transcription improvements plus new visual understanding: labeled bounding boxes for document regions, image descriptions, and chart data extracted as tables. Released under Apache 2.0 with an HF demo, positioned as a simpler alternative to complex document-understanding pipelines.

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