Introduction: The AI Jianghu — Storm Rising
Hey, I’m Mr. Guo.
The AI jianghu (martial arts world) has never lacked prestigious orthodox sects. For the past two years, everyone’s been diligently practicing from the same martial arts manual — RAG. They slice up massive documents (internal cultivation texts), vectorize them (opening meridians), store them in a “vector database” dantian (energy center), hoping AI can precisely summon inner power during combat. This path is stable, correct, but extremely resource-draining, and cultivation speed is agonizingly slow.
The whole jianghu believed this was the only righteous path to “Artificial General Intelligence.” Until yesterday, when DeepSeek, that dark horse, once again unveiled shocking “dark arts” — DeepSeek-OCR. After seeing its technical details and the community’s frenzied discussion, only seven words remained in my mind: I hereby crown them: Dark Arts Overlord.
1. Dissecting the “Dark Arts” — Optical Context Compression
How do orthodox sects (traditional OCR+RAG) work? Get a cultivation manual (one PDF page), transcribe it character by character (traditional OCR), find you’ve written 6,000+ characters (tokens). To help the senior disciple LLM (whose memory isn’t great) remember, you must distill those 6,000+ characters into a summary, losing massive information along the way.
DeepSeek’s approach is completely different — they don’t “read” scripture, they directly “refine” it. Their method:
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“Scripture” Becomes “Scroll”: Render an entire PDF page directly as a high-resolution image.
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“Scroll” Refined Into “Elixir”: Use a vision “pill furnace” called DeepEncoder to highly compress this image, refining it into 100-256 “vision elixirs” (vision tokens) containing infinite information.
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“Elixir” Becomes “Divine Art”: Finally, let a DeepSeek-3B-MoE decoder swallow this pill, instantly reconstructing the entire page’s content in its mind — even outputting Markdown, HTML tables, or chemical formulas.
See, while orthodox sects are still transcribing character by character, DeepSeek has already refined a 6,000-character manual into a 100-character pill — 60x compression efficiency. This isn’t even the same dimension of martial arts.
2. Power of the “Dark Arts” — Dimensional Strike
Once this “dark art” is deployed, the effect is dimensional annihilation:
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Efficiency Massacre: On the Fox benchmark, at 10x compression, decoding accuracy reaches 97%. This means with one-tenth the “energy consumption” (computational cost), they almost perfectly replicate the original martial art.
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Battle Achievements: In the OmniDocBench martial arts tournament, DeepSeek-OCR achieved SOTA (state-of-the-art) with an astonishing 100 tokens per page, crushing those “orthodox sects” needing thousands of tokens per page.
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Terrifying Cultivation Speed: One A100-40G “heavenly treasure” can “refine” over 200,000 pages of manuals per day. For LLMs needing massive data to level up, this is basically an infinite XP hack.
3. Risk of Energy Deviation — Fatal Flaws Behind Domineering Arts
However, any “dark cultivation” inherently has fatal weak points. DeepSeek-OCR is no exception.
Information Loss and Energy Chaos (Hallucination)
“Pills” are great, but ultimately compression products with inevitable “impurities.” Extensive community testing feedback shows that when processing financial, handwritten, and other complex documents, hallucination problems are very serious. A 1,000-page financial report at 99% accuracy still means potentially 2,000+ fatal errors.
Unstable Complex Formation Handling (Complex Layouts)
Facing multi-column, nested tables — these “mystical array” style complex layouts — this art often fails with insufficient stability.
Scripture Source Controversy (Data Source)
Its training data comes from “provided by Chinese government,” sparking intense discussion in overseas communities. Hidden ethical and data privacy issues are a major concern for global market expansion.
4. Jianghu Masters Debate — Is This “Future” or “Wrong Path”?
DeepSeek-OCR’s emergence instantly exploded on X and Hacker News, with various masters weighing in, forming two clearly divided camps.
Future Faction (Led by Andrej Karpathy)
This “sweeping monk” of the AI jianghu directly elevated DeepSeek-OCR’s paradigm to philosophical level. He believes this proves the future trend of “pixels over text input.” In his view, DeepSeek-OCR isn’t an OCR tool — it’s a completely new, more efficient path to AGI.
Pragmatist Faction (Led by Front-line Developers)
They care more about “can this thing actually be used right now?” After actual testing, they sharply criticized its stability and hallucination problems in complex scenarios. They argue that until near-perfect accuracy is achieved, this “dark art” has limited value in serious business contexts.
Mr. Guo’s Final Verdict: Dark Cultivators Are Also New World Trailblazers
Without doubt, DeepSeek has firmly claimed the throne of “Dark Arts Overlord” in the open-source AI jianghu through its R1 model and now OCR. Every move shows contempt for and disruption of traditional paradigms.
DeepSeek-OCR as a “product” may not be perfect yet, full of “energy deviation” risks. But as a “thought,” its value is immeasurable.
Together with Karpathy, it poses a thundering question to the entire AI jianghu: Have we become overly obsessed with text (tokens) — this inefficient, ugly, history-burdened input method? When models themselves are intelligent enough, shouldn’t we give them a more native, efficient way to “see” the world? From this angle, DeepSeek-OCR’s significance already far transcends OCR itself. It’s a great experiment about LLM’s future form. So I still say: I crown DeepSeek “Dark Arts Overlord.” Because in every great era of change, those who break old orders and pioneer new paths are often these heterodox, misunderstood “dark cultivators.”
Closing thoughts:
This is my first attempt at explaining some AI industry logic in more accessible language, not a wall of professional jargon that scares people off. I hope to help more people understand and recognize AI accessibly yet objectively, rather than just “when in doubt, DeepSeek.” AI should bring technology equity, cognitive equity — as long as you’re interested, it should have lower cognitive barriers.
That said, I truly admire DeepSeek’s unconventional innovation logic — and they actually make things work. Dark Arts Overlord is well-deserved!
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