DeepSeek taps Alibaba open-source AI technology to boost OCR performance
The Chinese AI start-up says its latest OCR model delivers stronger performance after adopting an Alibaba-developed open-source model
Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek on Tuesday unveiled an upgraded version of its optical character recognition (OCR) model, incorporating an Alibaba Cloud-developed open-source system to boost performance.
The new model, DeepSeek-OCR 2, replaced a key component of its original architecture with Alibaba Cloud’s lightweight Qwen2-0.5b model, according to a research paper released by the company.
The update, which comes just over three months after DeepSeek launched the first version of its OCR system, underscores the growing role of China’s open-source ecosystem in advancing domestic AI development.
Alibaba Cloud is the artificial intelligence and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the Post.
In the original model, DeepSeek relied on Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), a neural network framework developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI in 2021 that links images with text descriptions.
In OCR applications, CLIP helps systems identify and interpret text embedded in images.
DeepSeek said that replacing CLIP with Alibaba’s Qwen2-0.5b enabled its OCR model to process documents in a way that mimicked how humans read, following “flexible yet semantically coherent scanning patterns driven by inherent logical structures”, according to the research.