DeepSeek Just Solved AI's Most Expensive Problem

Chinese researchers have found a way to sidestep the computational limits that constrain every major AI platform

This week, a Chinese research team released something called DeepSeek-OCR. At first glance, it looks like another optical character recognition system. It is not.

What DeepSeek has built does the opposite of traditional OCR. Instead of turning images into text, it converts text into images. That inversion matters more than it might sound.

By rendering words as high-resolution images, the model compresses information by roughly ten times whilst maintaining around 97% accuracy. In practical terms, a large language model can now process a book or dataset ten times larger without hitting the limits of its context window. It can also do so at a fraction of the usual cost.