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Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#121

Post by [deleted] »

SyneRyder wrote: post #119
usef- wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/arti…

[deleted]

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#122

Post by fumeux_fume »

I think people misunderstand the utility of Mistral's OCR. It's not going to beat SOTA models for extraction on edge-case docs, but it's MUCH cheaper and faster and does an excellent job on simple ones. I've been working on converting PDFs to EPUBs and Mistral has been making steady improvements. On a chapter of Bleak House it was able to extract and tag the header, titles, and references at the bottom every time. The only thing it struggled on was line numbers in the right margin which it correctly tagged as "aside text" 3/5 times, but always separated from the core text each time. The important thing to keep in mind is that there's no prompting needed, just upload the PDF and voila!. There's even a batch mode with a 50% discount.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#123

Post by sgt »

IlikeMadison wrote: post #114
sgt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard that before though. I don't think you can compare economies like that since Russia has "near infinite potential" in natural resources, people, etc which Italy doesn't.

They can kick into a true war economy and then become significantly more of a threat. They haven't done so yet because the middle-class population likes their luxury lifestyle (for now).

I highly doubt Ukraine will "win" - in fact I believe Russia is ramping up to find an excuse at some point to attack a NATO country, but in a way and during a point in time it's difficult for NATO to retaliate.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#124

Post by discordance »

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…

This is too funny considering they did that themselves. I’m pretty tired of these companies deciding what we can and can’t do while they act with impunity.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#125

Post by adrianN »

SyneRyder wrote: post #118
dylan604 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

How bad is the first OCR pass allowed to be to still count as proofreading? Can you let Claude compare the images with /dev/random and make the necessary edits to correct differences?

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#126

Post by razemio »

ComputerPerson wrote: post #98
razemio wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a benchmark for handwriting recognition for a project while keeping line breaks and errors (grammar, spelling). Sonnet absolutely dominates it since a good half a year. 5.6 did not change that for me. This should also translate to better ocr.

You're the second person to mention handwriting. I think it might be handwriting-specific; perhaps Anthropic has a better corpus for this. I really wouldn't know, though. Anthropic models barf out copyright issues for my use case, so I'm unable even to benchmark them. It's a common problem when you're scanning public domain books. Mine are reference texts often cited.

Ah okay. Ofc handwriting is not copyrighted. Makes sense, that we do not have these issues.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#128

Post by micw »

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?

I also saw this when I made a (personal use only) book translation (agent learns how book 1-3 of a row is translated, then translates book 4 the same way because it is not available in my language). Claude happily translated most of the book, except a few chapters which it denied. Tried several times always the same results (with no other context about the rest of the book).

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#129

Post by simondotau »

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%?

Far worse than 70%. Chernobyl was a catastrophically flawed reactor design. Operators ran a badly planned safety test in which operators intentionally caused a dangerous state while key protections were disabled or bypassed.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#130

Post by regularfry »

fn-mote wrote: post #83
ux266478 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are only 9 countries that have nuclear weapons QED being first didn't grant exclusivity. The premise wasn't that AGI isn't useful. There are actually layers to the metaphor where first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful than it was for nuclear weapons, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader to discover.

> first-mover advantage of AGI is even less meaningful This is your opinion. Lots of tech money appears to disagree. You should at least try to explain your contrarian position, or cite your favorite source that makes an argument that you believe.

Lots of tech money is demonstrably wrong, at least in the general case. Microsoft's whole business model is to be the second mover. Patents exist because first mover advantage alone isn't enough to hold onto a win.

If AI is different, the onus is on AI folk to explain why, not the reverse.

The frontier labs are racing as hard as they can right now because they know as well as anyone else that they're at best 6 months, probably closer to 3 months, ahead of the generic commodity AI market. The majority of the tech money currently boosting them is a bet that either they can stay that far ahead without tripping, or that a moat can be engineered. It's not at all clear that it can - or, if it can, that it will before the money runs out.

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