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Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#111

Post by dylan604 »

lavieestdure wrote: post #109
dylan604 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being 70% as good in nuclear engineering sounds scary AF. How would you rank Chernobyl? Better or worse than 70%?

Being 70% as good does not mean causing accidents. Accidents are caused by systematic operational failures and fundamental design flaws.

If your employees are only 70% as good, as skilled, as knowledgeable while not knowing it, then you can absolutely kill a reactor just like Chernobyl. The overconfidence is what allowed them to put the reactor in the state they did and not realize the implications.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#112

Post by tkgally »

jassyr wrote: post #91
SyneRyder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Anthropic now flags OCR I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?

Not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve had Claude refuse to OCR pages from in-copyright books. I was sometimes (but not always) able to get around that by changing models, by telling it that I was doing the text conversion only for personal use, or by first telling it to use Tesseract or another OCR engine to do the initial pass and then having a Claude subagent proofread and clean up the OCR output.

I’ve also had it refuse to OCR public-domain books that included content that it didn’t like, such as references to prostitution in 19th-century books about Japan.

I had one session where Claude refused to continue after it hit some kind of guiderail restriction. I couldn’t see what the trigger was, so I started a new session, gave Claude the link to the previous session, and asked it to diagnose the problem. This new Claude said it couldn’t view the exact guardrail issue, but it did suggest a workaround that turned out to be effective.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#114

Post by IlikeMadison »

sgt wrote: post #80
missedthecue wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The largest non-US non-China model is Russian which surprised me.

Are you saying Russia is winning over Europe in AI already? Dang, sanctions really don't work.

GigaChat is russo-centric and is completely useless outside Russia itself, performs absolutely worse than Mistral once you start using English. Reminder that Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's alone. They are not winning over Europe in any single metric, let alone against the poorest country in Europe, which is not even part of NATO nor the EU, on the battlefield.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#115

Post by laichzeit0 »

tkgally wrote: post #112
jassyr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anthropic now flags OCR I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?

Not the person you’re responding to, but I’ve had Claude refuse to OCR pages from in-copyright books. I was sometimes (but not always) able to get around that by changing models, by telling it that I was doing the text conversion only for personal use, or by first telling it to use Tesseract or another OCR engine to do the initial pass and then having a Claude subagent proofread and clean up the OCR output. I’ve also…

Yeah I do something similar and Claude (well OpenAI too) just refuses to transcribe anything related to slavery and pederasty in Ancient Greece.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#116

Post by [deleted] »

josu wrote: post #61
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…

Whats the best open OCR at the moment?

[deleted]

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#117

Post by SyneRyder »

jassyr wrote: post #91
SyneRyder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Anthropic now flags OCR I haven't seen any difference in my ocr workflows, what do you mean by this?

The response / conversation gets blocked by the guardrails with "API Error: 400 Output blocked by content filtering policy"

At first I thought it was something in the scanned content that was being flagged, but it was the attempt to transcribe that was itself being flagged. Anthropic mention it on their pages:

"Anthropic takes these steps because Claude’s purpose is to generate new content and ideas, not to reproduce content that already exists."

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

Side note - Claude itself is not aware of this policy, and is unable to see the API responses - the turn just ends. Which turned into a really bizarre failure state where Claude thought I was gaslighting it and kept insisting it could do the work and even had the entire text in memory. Every time it would go to show me and prove it, it would hit API Error 400. I was only able to convince Claude by showing screenshots of my Claude Code screen output so it could see that I was seeing API errors. I've never seen Claude get into that angry & snarky state before, and I hope it doesn't happen again.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#118

Post by SyneRyder »

dylan604 wrote: post #93
SyneRyder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What does this entail? What does Claude do to decide that the text it was provided was hallucinated? Are you telling Claude that the source was OCR'd by another LLM?

I'm basically doing the OCR twice, except in the Claude proofreading pass, it is not being asked to transcribe the document to a Markdown file. I'm pointing it to the same image input files, and to the Mistral OCR transcript Markdown file (it knows it's a Mistral OCR output), and ask Claude to check that the text is correct and point out the errors - and then make the necessary edits.

I can't speak for Mistral OCR 4.1, but the hallucinations in 4.0 were so egregious (just completely making up new sentences in the middle of a page) that I knew I can't trust Mistral OCR on its own.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#119

Post by SyneRyder »

usef- wrote: post #106
Oras wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They were criticised/sued early on when people could reproduce copyright things. I dont think in this case it's something they'd prefer to do?

Yep, my understanding is that many guardrails like this are actually the result of government legislation (eg the Fable bans) or terms of settling copyright lawsuits over reproducing copyrighted text and lyrics.

I mentioned it in a sibling reply, but here's Anthropic's support document about not using Claude to reproduce content verbatim that already exists, regardless of copyright.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023638-why-am-i-rec...

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#120

Post by hakunin »

dylan604 wrote: post #99
hadlock wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being 70% as good in nuclear engineering sounds scary AF. How would you rank Chernobyl? Better or worse than 70%?

70%… Not great, not terrible.
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