Comment by daemonologist

My base expectation is that the proprietary OCR models will continue to win on real-world documents, and my guess is that this is because they have access to a lot of good private training data. These public models are trained on arxiv and e-books and stuff, which doesn't necessarily translate to typical business documents.

As mentioned though, the LLMs are usually better at avoiding character substitutions, but worse at consistency across the entire page. (Just like a non-OCR LLM, they can and will go completely off the rails.)