OCR has absolutely blown up in 2025, and honestly, my perspective on document processing has completely changed.
This year has been wild. Vision Language Models like Nanonets OCR2-3B hit the scene and suddenly we're getting accuracy on complex forms (vs for traditional OCR). We're talking handwritten checkboxes, watermarked documents, multi-column layouts, even LaTeX equations all handled in a single pass.
The market numbers say it all: OCR accuracy passed 98% for printed text, AI integration is everywhere, and real-time processing is now standard. The entire OCR market is hitting $25.13 billion in 2025 because this tech actually works now.
I wrote a detailed Medium article walking through:
1. Why vision LMs changed the game 2. NVIDIA NeMo Retriever architecture 3. Complete code breakdown 4. Real government/healthcare use cases 5. Production deployment guide