DeepSeek Integrates Alibaba’s Open-Source AI Technology to Enhance OCR Performance
Beijing, 27 January 2026 — Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek has announced a significant upgrade to its optical character recognition (OCR) technology by incorporating an open-source AI model developed by Alibaba Cloud. The enhanced model, named DeepSeek-OCR 2, marks an important milestone in the growing collaboration between startup innovators and China’s expanding open-source AI ecosystem.
DeepSeek unveiled DeepSeek-OCR 2 on Tuesday, revealing that a core component of its original OCR system has been replaced by Alibaba Cloud’s lightweight Qwen2-0.5b model. This change comes only a little over three months after the company introduced the first iteration of its OCR system and underscores a rapid advancement in AI technology boosted by domestic open-source contributions.
Previously, DeepSeek’s OCR system utilized Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP), a neural network architecture created by OpenAI and backed by Microsoft since 2021. CLIP enables AI to link images with textual descriptions, a capability crucial to recognizing and interpreting text within images for OCR applications.
By substituting CLIP with Alibaba’s Qwen2-0.5b, DeepSeek’s OCR model now processes documents with improved accuracy by mimicking human reading behavior. According to a research paper published by DeepSeek, the updated system scans images using “flexible yet semantically coherent scanning patterns driven by inherent logical structures,” which contributes to more natural and effective text recognition.
Alibaba Cloud serves as the artificial intelligence and cloud computing division of Alibaba Group Holding, the parent company of the South China Morning Post. The collaboration between DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud signifies the expanding influence of China’s open-source AI initiatives in fostering innovation and raising technical benchmarks within the domestic tech industry.
The introduction of DeepSeek-OCR 2 reflects ongoing efforts to enhance AI-powered document processing tools, which are increasingly vital across industries requiring automated data extraction from images, scanned documents, and other visual materials.
As AI continues to integrate further into practical applications, partnerships like that of DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud exemplify how shared technological resources can accelerate development and broaden the accessibility of advanced AI models within China and beyond.
