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Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

141–150 of 182 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#141

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…

Do all the models give you the bounding boxes, block labels as this one (allegedly) do?

It's very common. PaddleOCR is enough to get extremely well-done bounding boxes, and it runs very fast on a $150.00 GPU.

There's always room for improvement, though. I suspect a tool will emerge for highly detailed OCR that implements a nested bounding-box-based multi-scale approach, effectively OCRing small sections at a time and then gradually compiling them by expanding the surface area using the bounding boxes.

I've thought a lot about implementing it anyway.

edit: I see you're asking about the block labels. Leaving the comment in case someone finds it interesting.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#142

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. Th…

> The important thing to keep in mind is that there's no prompting needed, just upload the PDF and voila!

I'm sorry, noob here. I have a special book that I bought which I can open only inside the Kindle app (Windows/mobile). I have been meaning to screenshot the pages and convert them into a document/PDF. What do I have to do to make it fast? Just upload all the screenshots one by one and tell Mistral "Chat" to OCR them?

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#143

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.

> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI. You've fallen for the hype. The only way these AI companies can justify their bullshit worth and burn of capital is by promising a magical AGI. It's just marketing and it is still unclear if LLM's will ever be profitable. If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low. > Or a world where Europe only gets access to frontier models 6 months later. What…

> If they won't - then EU is doing the right thing laying low.

Exactly. People seem to forget that US is burning money at an accelerating rate without any promise of returns. This is a high risk situation. Time will tell.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#144

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.

> hope for Europe playing any significant role in the AI race

Ha. It's a large market of the LLMs consumption. So it which will affect the AI race. Just from other perspective than you assumed.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#145
post #66

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…

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.

It is why they're pushing for regulatory capture. Let us do the bad stuff, make the money, then we'll regulate everybody else out of the market.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#146

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.

Commoditization is a beautiful thing. It seems Anthropic and OpenAI are really struggling to maintain much of a moat. Mistral might not be leading but it's not trailing by that much either. And of course the Chinese are doing their own thing quite successfully.

The reality is that the US is betting its economy on data centers at great expense and is exposing its economy to great risk.

Also while geographically a lot of the money and processing power is in the US, the US has been relying on immigration to power its universities and especially AI research has roots all over the globe. India, China, Russia, Europe, etc. AI related know how is finding its way back to all these places.

So, I'm not too worried about the long term here. It will be interesting to see if Anthropic and OpenAI survive their IPOs. Seems like a risky financial bet at this point given the apparent lack of a moat. But if it works out, it will result in a lot of that IPO money being invested in data centers abroad. Including in the EU. Because data residency is a thing here and the EU is too big of a market for companies with that kind of valuation to ignore. We also produce a lot of energy infrastructure (e.g. gas and wind turbines). Those data centers will need lots of power.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, the intelligence/competence of the engineers running the plant had no actual bearing on the incident.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#148
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

? 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.

> Imagine a world where only one country has AGI/ASI

My own bet is that this won't happen with the current race, but that's another discussion.

Anyways, bit of a doomer take but if I imagine a world with AGI/ASI, countries don't mean shit anymore. Humans are not the top dog anymore.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and you trust the french?

I trust them more than the Americans and Chinese. Genuinely rooting for them to close the gap.

Good luck with that. Mistral is never going to produce a frontier model. Their business model is to rely on the EU regulations and cater to the bureaucracy. I won't be surprised if their next model is specialized on generating laws/regulations for EU lawmakers so they can sell it to EU. That way their business would survive for the next 5-10 years till EU implodes.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#150
post #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)

How does it compare to those services? Are there any benchmarks yet?
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