Comment by hobofan

Yeah, that sounds quite interesting. I'm wondering whether there is a bigger gap in performance (= quality) between text-only<->vision OCR in Chinese language than in English.

There is indeed a lot of semantic information contained in the signs that should help an LLM. E.g. there is a clear visual connection between 木 (wood/tree) and 林 (forest), while an LLM that purely has to draw a connection between "tree" and "forest" would have a much harder time seeing that connection independent of whether it's fed that as text or vision tokens.