Open OCR models expansion: Chandra and OlmOCR-2 enable open-weight pipelines

AI Impact Summary

Open-model OCR landscape expands with Chandra and OlmOCR-2, highlighting that open-weight models offer cost and privacy advantages while matching performance for many document tasks. The guide emphasizes evaluating capabilities such as transcription, grounding, table/chart handling, and the choice between fine-tuning versus using out-of-the-box models, plus output formats like DocTags, HTML, Markdown, and JSON. It also points to multimodal retrieval and document QA as next steps, signaling teams should design pipelines capable of switching models and output formats to fit specific use cases.