> Are there leaderboards that you follow or trust?

Not for OCR.

Regardless of how much some people complain about them, I really do appreciate the effort Artificial Analysis puts into consistently running standardized benchmarks for LLMs, rather than just aggregating unverified claims from the AI labs.

I don't think LMArena is that amazing at this point in time, but at least they provide error bars on the ELO and give models the same rank number when they're overlapping.

> Also, do you have preferred OCR models in your experience?

It's a subject I'm interested in, but I don't have enough experience to really put out strong opinions on specific models.