Dharma’s 3B OCR model beat frontier APIs and cost 52x less, challenging enterprise AI teams to prove domain fit before buying scale.
Key takeaways
- A 3-billion-parameter specialized OCR model beat every commercial frontier API tested in Dharma’s benchmark, and did it at roughly **52 times lower cost per millio...
- The finding comes from Dharma’s May 22, 2026 article on the Hugging Face Blog, which argues that when a model’s training history sits close enough to the deployment ta...
- A 3B OCR model broke the bigger-is-safer habit
- For the past few years, the safe enterprise answer was obvious: buy the largest frontier model available, especially when failure felt more expensive than the invoice....
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Canonical source: https://mlxio.com/ai-ml/3b-ocr-ai-procurement
