Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mistral OCR 3

mistral.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 137 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#11

Post by pzo »

pzo wrote: post #2

there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that would be good to compare to those especially when some are not even 1B params and can be run on edge devices. - paddleOCR-VL - olmOCR-2 - chandra - dots.ocr I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.

what I like in MistralOCR is that they have simple pricing $1/1k pages and API hosted on their servers. With other OCR is hard to compare pricing because are token based and you don't know how many tokens is the image unless you run your own test.

E.g. with Gemini 3.0 flash you might seem that model pricing increased only slightly comparing to Gemini 2.5 flash until you test it and will see that what used to be 258 per 384x384 input tokens now is around 3x more.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#12

Post by belval »

Tiberium wrote: post #3

From a tweet: https://x.com/i/status/2001821298109120856 > can someone help folks at Mistral find more weak baselines to add here? since they can't stomach comparing with SoTA.... > (in case y'all wanna fix it: Chandra, dots.ocr, olmOCR, MinerU, Monkey OCR, and PaddleOCR are a good start)

I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document understanding".

Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models instead will make in-word typos.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#13

Post by BoredPositron »

petcat wrote: post #4

It seems like Mistral is just chasing around sort of "the fringes" of what could be useful AI features. Are they just getting out-classed by OAI, Google, Anthropic? It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are.

I guess it's better to do the same stuff everyone else is doing?

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#15

Post by bee_rider »

petcat wrote: post #4

It seems like Mistral is just chasing around sort of "the fringes" of what could be useful AI features. Are they just getting out-classed by OAI, Google, Anthropic? It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are.

Following the leaders too closely seems like a bad move, at least until a profitable business model for an AI model training company is discovered. Mistral’s models are pretty good, right? I mean they don’t have all the scaffolding around them that something like chatGPT does, but building all that scaffolding could be wasted effort until a profitable business model is shown.

Until then, they seem to be able to keep enough talent in the EU to train reasonably good models. The kernel is there, which seems like the attainable goal.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#16

Post by hereme888 »

pzo wrote: post #2

there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that would be good to compare to those especially when some are not even 1B params and can be run on edge devices. - paddleOCR-VL - olmOCR-2 - chandra - dots.ocr I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.

https://www.codesota.com/ocr

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#18

Post by culi »

pzo wrote: post #2

there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that would be good to compare to those especially when some are not even 1B params and can be run on edge devices. - paddleOCR-VL - olmOCR-2 - chandra - dots.ocr I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.

Someone posted a project here about a month ago where they compare models in head-to-head matchups similar to llmarena

https://www.ocrarena.ai/leaderboard

Hasn't been updated for Mistral but so far gemeni seems to top the leaderboard.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#19

Post by numlocked »

film42 wrote: post #10

Is open router still sending all OCR jobs to Mistral? I wonder if they're trying to keep that spot. Seems like Mistral and Google are the best at OCR right now, with Google leading Mistral by a fair bit.

(I work at OpenRouter) If you send a PDF to our API we will:

1. Use native PDF parsing if the model supports it

2. Use this Mistral OCR model (we updated to this version yesterday)

3. UNLESS you override the "engine" param to use an alternate. We support a JS-based (non-LLM) parser as well [0]

So yes, in practice a lot of OCR jobs go to Mistral, but not all of them.

Would love to hear requests for other parsers if folks have them!

[0] https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/multimodal/pdfs#p...

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#20

Post by vasco »

Gave it a birth registry from a Portuguese locality from 1755 which my dad and I often decipher to figure out geneology and it did a terrible job.

Regular Gemini Thinking can actually get 70-80% of the documents correct except lots of mistakes on given names. Chatgpt maybe understands like 50-60%.

This Mistral model butchered the whole text, literally not a word was usable. To the point I think I'm doing something wrong.

The test document: https://files.fm/u/3hduyg65a5

Post reply on HN