There's certainly smaller and even better models for OCR. But the whole "point" of LLM (forget it, it's not AGI) is you don't need to make many specialized mod

There's certainly smaller and even better models for OCR. But the whole "point" of LLM (forget it, it's not AGI) is you don't need to make many specialized models and cursed pipelines anymore, to solve a definitely-in-reach-without-LLM problem your farmer neighbor wants to pay $500 for. Before LLM it's not going to be done as it takes more than $500 engineer hours. Now we just brute force. Sure, more compute, but we get it done! I guess your OCR dream is covered by this.