- VLMs are way better at handling layout and context where OCR systems fail miserably

- VLMs read documents like humans do, which makes dealing with special layouts like bullets, tables, charts, footnotes much more tractable with a singular approach rather than have to special case a whole bunch of OCR + post-processing

- VLMs are definitely more expensive, but can be specialized and distilled for accurate and cost effective inference

In general, I think vision + LLMs can be trained to explicitly to “extract” information and avoid reasoning/hallucinating about the text. The reasoning can be another module altogether.