1. Introduction

DeepSeek has done it again.
On October 20, 2025, the company released DeepSeek-OCR, a brand-new open-source model for Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Unlike traditional OCR systems that read characters sequentially, DeepSeek-OCR actually looks at them.
It introduces a visual token compression mechanism — compressing a 1,000-character document into just 100 visual tokens while maintaining up to 97% accuracy.