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Mistral OCR 3

mistral.ai

101–110 of 137 posts

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#101
I appreciate having an OCR interface rather than having to chat with a bot, but unfortunately chatting with Gemini 3 gives far better results than this. I gave it the document Gemini 3 got a surprisingly good result on:

https://urn.digitalarkivet.no/URN:NBN:no-a1450-rk10101508282...

and the output wasn't even recognizably Danish.

Just out of pity I gave it a birthday card from my sister written in very readable modern handwriting, and while in managed to make the contents of that readable, the errors it made reveals that it has very little contextual intelligence. Even if ! and ? can be hard to tell apart sometimes, they weren't here, and you do not usually start a birthday letter with "Happy Birthday brother?"

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#102

Does it handle math expressions (those rendered from LaTeX) well? I've been looking for a good OCR model to transcribe my math textbooks into markdown (obviously ignoring the images and figures) with LaTeX as math expressions, and none of the current OCR models work reliably enough. EDIT: you can try it yourself for free at https://console.mistral.ai/build/document-ai/ocr-playground once you create a developer accoun…

I've just finished processing thousands of documents using the Gemini Pro 3 vision model and it outperformed every OCR and image model I've tested by a long shot, perfect markdown with latex for the math every time.

3 flash is also insanely good even slightly outperforms 3 pro for me.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#103
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent like three hours trying to get one of these running and then gave up. I think the paddleOCR one. It took an hour and a half to install 12 gigabytes of pytorch dependencies that can't even run on my device, and then it told me it had some sort of versioning conflict. (I think I was supposed to use UV, but I had run out of steam by that point.) Maybe I should have asked Claude to install it for me. I gave Claud…

gemini-cli is good for this sort of thing. You can just tell it "Find out why xyz.py doesn't run" and let it crunch. It will try reasonably hard to get you out of Python dependency hell, and (more important) it generally knows when to give up. But yes, in general, you want to use uv. Otherwise, the next Python application you install WILL break the last one you installed. I suppose you could use gemini-cli as a subst…

Actually, I just remembered, this was inside uv!

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#105
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Mistral’s models are pretty good, right Are they? IIRC their best model is still worse than the gpt-oss-120B?

Calling it oss is a farce

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#106
post #86

I'm reading worse performance than many OSS offerings like Paddle, MinerU, MonkeyOCR, etc: https://www.codesota.com/ocr

Their handwriting benchmark is not useful. The test cases aren’t even handwritten! https://www.codesota.com/ocr/best-for-handwriting

That’s just the illustration. But this is misleading - I will fix it asap and show real examples. I’ve run the mistral ocr on other benchmark

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#107
Can we have an open source tool that uses the same API, and that you can just instruct to use Mistral or any other service if you think the open source tool has quality issues for a particular text?

This makes more sense to me, as I find that FOSS OCR is quite okay for most usecases.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#108
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…

They can't hire the best talent because the most experienced people will not leave their homes to chase a high-risk role with questionable remuneration by relocating their whole life to Paris or London.

This goes to show how leaders in Mistral don't quite get that they are not special as they seem to think they are. Anthropic or OpenAI also require their talent to relocate but with stakes that are at least a high reward - $500k or $1M a year is a good start that is maybe worth investing into.

Re: Mistral OCR 3

#110
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.

We're too busy with real life to bother with generating SVGs of pelicans on bicycles sorry, but feel free to dump billions on chatbots
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