LightOn drops a tiny 1B OCR model that beats 9B giants
LightOn just open-sourced LightOnOCR-2-1B, an Apache 2.0 end-to-end vision-language model that turns PDFs and scans into clean text without multi-stage pipelines. Despite its tiny 1B footprint, it beats Chandra-9B on OlmOCR-Bench and runs 1.73x faster than DeepSeekOCR. The release also includes bounding-box variants and a massive 16M-page training dataset.