Hey! I am the founder of Tensorlake. We benchmarked the models that our customers consider using in enterprises or regulated industries where there is a big need for processing documents for various automation. Benchmarking takes a lot of time so we focussed on the ones that we get asked about.

On Gemini and other VLMs - we excluded these models because they don't do visual grounding - aka they don't provide page layouts, bounding boxes of elements on the pages. This is a table stakes feature for use-cases customers are building with Tensorlake. It wouldn't be possible to build citations without bounding boxes.

On pricing - we are probably the only company offer a pure on-demand pricing without any tiers. With Tensorlake, you can get back markdown from every page, summaries of figures, tables and charts, structured data, page classification, etc - in ONE api call. This means we are running a bunch of different models under the hood. If you add up the token count, and complexity of infrastructure to build a complex pipeline around Gemini, and other OCR/Layout detection model I bet the price you would end up with won't be any cheaper than what we provide :) Plus doing this at scale is very very complex - it requires building a lot of sophisticated infrastructure - another source of cost behind modern Document Ingestion services.

Thanks for mentioning them, indeed their post seem to only surface a couple of names in the field and maybe not the most relevant ones.

Personally I use OpenAI models via the API for transcription of PDF files. Is there a big difference between them and Gemini models?

We haven’t tested Chandra yet, because it’s very new. Under the hood Tensorlake is very similar to Marker - it’s a pipeline based OCR API, we do layout detection, Text Recognition and Detection, Table Structure Understanding, etc. We then use VLMs to enrich the results. Our models are much bigger than marker, and thus takes a little longer to parse documents. We optimized for accuracy. We will have a faster API soon.

There was an unusual traffic spike around that time, if you try now it should be a lot faster. We were calling up but there was not enough GPU capacity at that time.