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Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#51

Post by kergonath »

merb wrote: post #31
aliljet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accuracy is truly what people die for in the OCR game. Price isn't the primary function here.. it's an equation of price, accuracy, speed, and in mayn cases regulation.

Tbf even with tesseract you already get shit ton of accuracy and you can probably do these 1000 pages for way less than 3.5€. For 3.5€ you can spin up a cloud instance with 8vCPU+32gb on gcloud for 11 hours (or 11 instances for an hour) which can do way more than 1000 pages per hour on tesseract. It takes you around 6 second per page +-4 seconds start/stop depending on what you are doing on that instance size without…

Tesseract is not a substitute for these models, which understand complex layouts and also extract bounding boxes for things like tables and pictures. They are also much better at making sense of cursive scripts.

I’ve been there, implementing a way to linearise text from a document with pages with 1, 2 or 3 columns, some of them in landscape is a nightmare. And that’s not even considering equations.

In the end it’s way easier to use a specialised model, trained by other people to do exactly what I need.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#52

Post by Telemakhos »

piterrro wrote: post #24

For anyone interested, I have an ocr pipeline running on rented GPUs, doing around 1000pages for 0.05-01 usd with around 0.8 seconds per page with full bounding boxes support for grounding. If you’re interested you can find contact to me via this profile. 3.5 usd/1000 pages is just too expensive…

Can it produce accessible PDF files that will pass accessibility tests? Someone who can do that will make a killing laundering PDFs for academia: by April 26, every PDF, syllabus, and academic document needs to comply with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which means structural tagging, alt text, and lots of other checklist items that AI could probably generate.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#53

Post by booi »

petcat wrote: post #7
ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine. It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could p…

> the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising considering the price difference, but it would ne nice if an OCR-specific model could do better. I haven't been impressed with any of Mistral's models. They obviously realized that they couldn't compete at the frontier so they decided to go for smaller focused models but even those have not been that good.

This is what I found as well.

We moved away from Cursor but I was looking for a model that would help with FIM (fill-in-middle) multiline autocompletion and people were recommending Mistral's Codestral. We gave it a shot and it was lackluster at best.. Even Google's Gemini did a significantly better job than Codestral.

Ultimately Opus-class models got good enough and I don't do much manual coding anymore.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#55

Post by giancarlostoro »

ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine. It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could p…

So is Mistral OCR the best one? Have any other OCR models caught some of what you describe? I've been kind of interested in how "OCR" type models work compared to old school OCR.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#56

Post by booi »

ux266478 wrote: post #35
BenzeneDream wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? It absolutely is a race. Whether thats a positive thing or not is debatable but every lab is definitely in a race. What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. Far from ideal.

> What prize do you win? Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. "Winning the race" doesn't give you that in any meaningful capacity. It gives you, at the absolute most, a temporary window where that's the case. See: nuclear weapons.

Citing nuclear weapons isn't the flex you think it is. There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons and they absolutely flex this power over non-nuclear powers (see Ukraine, Germany, SE Asia etc..)

Europe already has an innovation problem that's already causing structural economic instabilities which Germany has been struggling (and lately failing) to prop up.

As much as it pains me to say this, AI is already a tech revolution and it seems like Europe is just ignoring it. There's more innovation in 3 blocks in downtown San Francisco than the entire continent of Europe.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#57

Post by giancarlostoro »

rtaylorgarlock wrote: post #8
ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine. It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could p…

Yet: how is pricing? Evaluating contents and routing appropriately isn't a new challenge in OCR, one of the oldest fields of applications in ML. Thus, how do the smaller open models perform in tandem with relatively pricy $/pg models & APIs? Your use case is remarkably rare relative to the volume and price sensitivity of enterprise data warehouse ops.

The big difference is traditional OCR used basic pattern matching to find text, whereas models like Mistral OCR (and GPT, etc) use computer vision instead and deep learning to parse text, math equations, and apparently in some cases extract images too.

I'd love to see some advancements in traditional OCR based on ideas and concepts we've learned from newer "OCR-like" models since traditional OCR is drastically cheaper.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#58

Post by hadlock »

king_crimson wrote: post #3

At this point I lost all hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race. If that’s a good or a bad thing I don’t know, but it seems to me like that’s the reality.

Much like spaceflight, aerospace or nuclear engineering, you need to retain local talent for national defense purposes. Being 70% as good is still way better than being 100% dependent and heavily leveraged by your opponents.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#59

Post by bugglebeetle »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #55
ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine. It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could p…

So is Mistral OCR the best one? Have any other OCR models caught some of what you describe? I've been kind of interested in how "OCR" type models work compared to old school OCR.

The datalab models are the best ones.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#60

Post by ComputerPerson »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #55
ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

I've got a scan from a book that I OCR with new releases. Ligatures, critical sigla, Fraktur letterforms, subscripts, superscripts, etc. Nothing special about this model for overly-detailed work like mine. It's been a while since I last tested (and discontinued my subscription), but the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising, given the price difference, but it would be nice if an OCR-specific model could p…

So is Mistral OCR the best one? Have any other OCR models caught some of what you describe? I've been kind of interested in how "OCR" type models work compared to old school OCR.

My use case isn't in the realm of old-school OCR, so it's not a good comparison, but anyway:

As another user pointed out, it's surprisingly random (task-specific). Llama Scout outperformed Gemini Flash 2.5 on a benchmark I built at the time. I didn't include an OCR models.

Mistral might indeed be the best OCR-specific model for my task, now that you ask. Funny. It's so bad at my work that I didn't register it might be the best in its category. This is just based on vibes from my single scan.

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