It is fascinating. Vision language models are unreasonably good compared to dedicated OCR and even the language tasks to some extent.
My take is it fits into the general concept that generalist models have significant advantages because so much more latent structure maps across domains than we expect. People still talk about fine tuning dedicated models being effective but my personal experience is it's still always better to use a larger generalist model than a smaller fine tuned one.
My take is it fits into the general concept that generalist models have significant advantages because so much more latent structure maps across domains than we expect. People still talk about fine tuning dedicated models being effective but my personal experience is it's still always better to use a larger generalist model than a smaller fine tuned one.