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Mistral OCR 4

mistral.ai

61–70 of 143 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#61

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.

Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...

You're american?

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#62

The comparisons rank it against GPT and Gemini but not Claude. Is Claude's vision support simply not competitive when it comes to OCR tasks?

I think until Fable, Claude's vision was significantly worse than GPT and Gemini in my personal experience. I eval almost every vision model since I work on screenshot to code conversion project: https://github.com/abi/screenshot-to-code.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#63

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.

There is even like an american flag flying high in the background

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#65
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 curious what your findings are for the best model for your use case

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#66

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'.

The armies of people desperate to defend mistral, scouring the internet for any of the hundreds of negative posts made about it daily is pathetic. There's a reason it needs 'fanboys' and 'defenders'... it sucks. Id have loved to use a European alternative, but Europeans need to get serious and actually offer an alternative that has value other than "it's trash, but it has a Made in Europe badge".

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#67
Tested with Malayalam, normal handwriting got accurate but a slight different style got detected as kannada. Have samples if required, which sarvam got done with 99% accuracy leaving one text error.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#68
post #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.

Sure, well for me it isn't. It has been awful for even toy tasks that opencode's free plan did without an issue. The general sentiment about it is that it is really bad. I wish I knew before paying.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#70
post #11

Do these models (this one or its competitors) do handwriting recognition?

Yes, we've been using Transkribus for this extensively. My wife is a historian who spends quite a bit of time sorting through old letters and diaries, and it has been a considerable quality of life improvement.

Even if you are able to read someone's scratches, having a model to do the bulk lifting saves your eyes a lot of squinting. One thing that makes Transkribus useful for research vs a chat interface is that it can line up its interpretation alongside the original image so you can examine its work directly.

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