A general-purpose MoE multimodal beat every dedicated vision model on my father's handwriting

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For context: I’ve been transcribing a multi-generational archive of handwritten family letters on my own hardware. The first two posts covered why I’m doing this at all and how to set it up on your own machine . This post is the surprising finding — the one I didn’t expect going in.

I assumed the right tool for a vision task was a vision model. That’s the obvious reach. If you’re reading handwriting, you reach for something labeled “VL.” If you can find one fine-tuned for OCR and handwriting specifically, even better.

Benchmarks on Thede Technologies

A general-purpose MoE multimodal beat every dedicated vision model on my father's handwriting