Live data from Hacker News

Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

61–70 of 182 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#61

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…

Whats the best open OCR at the moment?

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#62

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…

While I haven't tried OpenAI for OCR, I've put my small scale OCR work through both Claude and Mistral OCR. Claude is absolutely better - even in OCR work I did last week and compared with Mistral OCR 4.0.

Mistral's one advantage is that Anthropic now flags OCR, because they don't allow anything that could be considered "reproduction", even of work for which you own the copyright. So my new workflow is Mistral OCR for the actual OCR, followed by a proofreading pass by Claude (which is allowed). Claude is obviously more expensive, but it caught entirely hallucinated sentences created by Mistral OCR 4.0, so I was glad for the backup check.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#63

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.

[flagged]

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#65
post #6

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.

It's not a race. You don't get anything for winning.

Well, you get hundreds of billions in debt, and then you get open weight models distilling your proprietary models.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#66

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…

While I haven't tried OpenAI for OCR, I've put my small scale OCR work through both Claude and Mistral OCR. Claude is absolutely better - even in OCR work I did last week and compared with Mistral OCR 4.0. Mistral's one advantage is that Anthropic now flags OCR, because they don't allow anything that could be considered "reproduction", even of work for which you own the copyright. So my new workflow is Mistral OCR fo…

Same company that OCRed millions of books, the irony.

I feel Anthropic is destroying itself with all these restriction. They got away because their models were the best for coding, but that is not an advantage anymore as OpenAI and other open source are already better.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#67
post #4

1000 Pages / 3.5€ this is expensive as hell. If this is not fastly superior than something like tesseract it is not worth it.

Even comparing to AWS Textract or Azure Document Intelligence, this is very expensive (more than double)

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#68
Does anyone know a site that lets you browse examples of input / output pairs?, particularly with layout analysis (bounding boxes of figures, tables, etc).

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#70
post #31
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 super picky though often failing pixel-perfect screenshots...

So, maybe it can be tuned for your usecase but with that kind of investment €3.5 for 1000 pages is a bargain...

Post reply on HN