Reading documents models that run on 36 GB
24 models with published weights that fit in 36 GB — a MacBook Pro with 36. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 37 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.
An Apple configuration, and a comfortable one: it holds what 32 GB holds without the machine feeling tight, which in practice means a longer context or a browser you do not have to close first.
Models that read documents — scans, photographs of pages, forms, tables — and return text or structure. The interesting difference between them is not whether they can read a clean page, which they all can, but what they do with a table, a stamp, a handwritten margin or a column that breaks across pages. Several are priced per page rather than per token, which makes them easy to budget and hard to compare with the rest.
- chandraDatalab8.8B≈5.7 GB at 4-bit
- NuMarkdown-8B-ThinkingNuMind8.3B≈5.4 GB at 4-bit
- RolmOCRReducto8.3B≈5.4 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- olmOCR-7B-0225-previewAi28.3B≈5.4 GB at 4-bit
- llava-v1.6-mistral-7b-hfLlava Hugging Face7.0B≈4.5 GB at 4-bit
- olmOCR-2-7B-1025Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)7.0B≈4.5 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- olmOCR-7B-0725-FP8Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)7.0B≈4.5 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- olmOCR-7B-0825Allen Institute for AI (Ai2)7.0B≈4.5 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- chandra-ocr-2Datalab5.3B≈3.4 GB at 4-bit
- NuExtract3NuMind4.5B≈3.0 GB at 4-bit
- Unlimited-OCRBaidu3.3B≈2.2 GB at 4-bit
- dots.ocrdots studio3.0B≈2.0 GB at 4-bit
- Isaac 0.2 2B PreviewPerceptron2.0B≈1.3 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- LightOnOCR-1B-1025LightOn AI1.2B≈0.8 GB at 4-bit
- HunyuanOCRTencent Hunyuan1.1B≈0.7 GB at 4-bit
- LightOnOCR-2-1BLightOn AI1.0B≈0.7 GB at 4-bit
- Isaac 0.2 1BPerceptron1.0B≈0.7 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- PaddleOCR-VL-1.5paddlepaddle1.0B≈0.6 GB at 4-bit
- PaddleOCR-VL-1.6paddlepaddle1.0B≈0.6 GB at 4-bit
- PaddleOCR-VL-0.9Bpaddlepaddle0.9B≈0.6 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- OvisOCR2ATH-MaaS0.9B≈0.6 GB at 4-bit
- GOT-OCR2_0StepFun0.7B≈0.5 GB at 4-bit
- GOT-OCR-2.0-hfstepfun-ai0.6B≈0.4 GB at 4-bit
- trocr-base-handwrittenMicrosoft0.3B≈0.2 GB at 4-bit