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Mistral OCR 4

mistral.ai

41–50 of 143 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#41

After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.

Same, I got a refund 3 days later. It is unusable.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long have you been testing this? Have you noted a large improvement? I tested Opus for this quite a while ago (maybe 4.5? Whatever was out about a year ago), and it performed quite poorly on my use case.

I have put together an internal benchmark on 1000s of business documents with weird tables, structure, etc. that I run on every relevant model release. Opus 4.8 performs very very well. But it is obviously overkill for the task (and expensive at doing so). I just wanted to respond to the OP.

I'm assuming that the reason I didn't have good success rate is because it was not scanned documents, but photographs, and lighting conditions weren't always ideal. I think scanned business documents are a happy-case scenario in a way. (obv, you seem to run it against some complex documents, so that's impressive)

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#43

After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.

Opposite advice. It's very useful to me for dev and general tasks.

Been using Claude in parallele, it's better not not that much, just 10x (or 100x ?) more expensive.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#44
post #8

" A note on out-of-scope use. OCR 4 is a document-understanding model, not a decision-maker. It is not intended for medical diagnosis, legal advice or judgment, high-stakes financial decisions, safety-critical systems, real-time/latency-sensitive processing, or non-document inputs (raw audio, video, etc.). " Can't wait for the "oh so innovative" manager who will suggest during the next meeting "Ok... but what if WE u…

“I delegated critical financial decisions to my OCR software, and you won’t believe what happened next.”

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#45

After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.

Mistral's coding models aren't on par with current SOTA US and Chinese models if that's what you're referring to, but I rather like their OCR models.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#47

After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.

> After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it

For OCR?

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe this story. Opus 4.8 scanned hundreds of PDFs for me recently with the worst handwriting imaginable. 100% successful, other than one record where even I could not figure out what was written.

I do not believe this story, because of the message I just posted above. That's not really productive lol, I'm glad it worked for you but these models are non-deterministic and 'YMMV' very much applies everywhere. I had it parse receipts (in fairness, in variable lightning), all taken from iPhone cameras in the past year. And yeah, not a great job, about 20% failed to get the date correct. (Not outrageously wrong, e.…

[deleted]

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#49

A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european. I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.

~Any borderline-large European tech company will have an office on the US west coast, for sales if nothing else. And probably sales engineering. The timezone difference is eight to ten hours; there is really no way around it.

(I did work for one which had an office in Vancouver, instead; same tz.)

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#50

A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european. I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.

To the best of my knowledge, most of the founding team started their careers in the US ( meta,etc..) and their primary investors are US VCs. In that regard, they smartly benefit on both side : US funding and European brains
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