Baidu has released PP-OCRv5 on Hugging Face, a new optical character recognition (OCR) model built to outperform large vision-language models (VLMs) in specialized text recognition tasks. Unlike general-purpose architectures such as Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen2.5-VL, or GPT-4o, which handle OCR as part of broader multimodal workflows, PP-OCRv5 is purpose-built for accuracy, efficiency, and speed. By Robert Krzaczyński