Developers building OCR pipelines on their own hardware get a free Apache-licensed model, though you'll need a GPU to run it.

Kenning's take

What it does

DeepSeek-OCR 2 is an open vision-language model for reading text from documents and images, including converting pages to Markdown. Its new DeepEncoder V2 reorders visual tokens by the layout of the page rather than a fixed scan order. Code and weights are free to download under the Apache 2.0 licence.

  • Document to Markdown conversion
  • DeepEncoder V2 that reorders visual tokens by page layout
  • Runs with vLLM or Hugging Face Transformers
  • About 3.4 billion parameters
  • Apache 2.0 licence

Who it suits. Developers building document parsing, OCR or data extraction pipelines who can run their own models.

Key facts

Category
AI models
Part of
DeepSeek
Made by
DeepSeek
Released
27 January 2026
How to get it
free download from GitHub and Hugging Face; needs a GPU to run
Works on
open weights
In the UK
Yes
Free plan
open weights, Apache 2.0

FAQ

When was DeepSeek-OCR 2 released?

The Hugging Face model page was created on 27 January 2026 and the paper was submitted on 28 January 2026.

Is DeepSeek-OCR 2 free?

Yes. The code and weights are published under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Facts from the maker's own pages and the sources listed. Checked 2026-10-11.