I've been consistently surprised by Gemini's OCR capabilities. And yeah, Qwen is climbing the vision ladder _fast_.

In my workflows I often have multiple models competing side-by-side, so I get to compare the same task executed on, say, 4o, Gemini, and Qwen. And I deal with a very wide range of vision related tasks. The newest Qwen models are not only overall better than their previous release by a good margin, but also much more stable (less prone to glitching) and easier to finetune. I'm not at all surprised they're topping the OCR benchmark.

What bugs me though is OpenAI. Outside of OCR, 4o is still king in terms of overall understanding of images. But 4o is now almost a year old, and in all that time they have neither improved the vision performance in any newer releases, nor have they improved OCR. OpenAI's OCR has been bad for a long time, and it's both odd and annoying.

Taken with a grain of salt since again I've only had it in my workflow for about a week or two, but I'd say Qwen 2.5 VL 72b beats Gemini for general vision. That lands it in second place for me. And it can be run _locally_. That's nuts. I'm going to laugh if Qwen drops another iteration in a couple months that beats 4o.