Core Insights - The article discusses the resurgence of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology driven by advancements in AI models, particularly in the context of a new course by Andrew Ng that focuses on "Agent Document Extraction" (ADE) [2][3][4]. Group 1: OCR Technology Developments - Major companies like DeepSeek, Zhizhu, Alibaba, and Tencent are intensively updating their OCR technologies, indicating a competitive landscape [7][14]. - DeepSeek's OCR technology utilizes a specialized visual encoder to compress lengthy documents into visual tokens, achieving a 97% accuracy rate while processing over 200,000 pages daily with a single A100-40G GPU [9]. - Zhizhu's Glyph framework converts long texts into compact images, overcoming context window limitations, and their GLM-4.6V series supports complex document types with high performance [12][13]. Group 2: Agent Document Extraction (ADE) - The ADE approach enhances traditional OCR by integrating a "visual-first" strategy to understand document layouts and relationships, ensuring data accuracy and intelligent processing [24][25]. - The DPT (Document Pre-trained Transformer) model used in ADE achieved a remarkable accuracy of 99.15% in the DocVQA benchmark, surpassing human performance [28][29]. - ADE's robustness allows it to accurately parse complex documents, including large tables and handwritten formulas, while assigning unique IDs and pixel coordinates to data blocks for precise extraction [31][32]. Group 3: Practical Applications and Deployment - The course provides practical guidance on deploying ADE technology on cloud platforms like AWS, enabling automated document processing pipelines [34]. - The integration of visual grounding technology allows for direct referencing of original documents when AI provides answers, enhancing transparency and reliability [33].