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Mistral OCR 4

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR 4

#131

Post by ericyd »

adolph wrote: post #113
ericyd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not totally sure what your point is, but my response is that most OCR technology is reading “automated” (i.e. computer-printed) documents such as PDFs and things like that. So I think parsing the numbers by “automated” vs “non-automated” is not a very helpful way to think about the success of USPS OCR technology; the gross percentage of manual reviews compared to total mail volume is a much better way at looking…

My response was to your thesis: "whenever I see announcements about OCR it feels like this should be a solved problem if it’s been accomplished at the scale of USPS for many years." I think the USPS has "solved" much of the problem by getting the most prolific generators of mail to conform with more basic tech than OCR, the bar code. Much commercial mail (including first class non-junk mail) is physically presorted a…

Ah that is an interesting point!

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#132

Post by port11 »

neuronic wrote: post #99
rjzzleep wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...

This is absolutely not why there are no leading AI, other important silicon tech, or relevant space companies in Europe. To some degree they exist but are all B-Tier in comparison to US/China. You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess. Just not the way it needs to be for this. The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future…

Have you raised venture capital? I have. It’s fine.

You don’t get US-level (or even Israel/China/Singapore) seeds, but often you get a matching public investment. Germany has better matching funds, but we did alright in Belgium, and previously Portugal.

Let’s stop pretending the EU can ‘fix’ this. It’s cultural, we’re simply not risk takers (on average) because a “normal” job comes with great benefits. Most of us don’t struggle to survive and have to “pull ourselves by the bootstraps”. The social security safety net protects you.

That’s all fine. We’re fine. No, we won’t lead on AI productisation, but we have AMAZING fundamental research going on at unis. I hired 2 such people in PhD+job setups, that part is also working fine.

Chill.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#133

Post by port11 »

throwa356262 wrote: post #74
rjzzleep wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...

Oh come on! Mistral has a successful business model and is actually making money. Not sure opening and anthropic are doing that yet.

> Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue is now growing faster than Zoom did during the pandemic, and Google and Facebook in the run-up to their initial public offerings. It is set to turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#134

Post by mercer »

idoubtit wrote: post #105
ericyd wrote: post #77

I’ve always thought the US Postal Service is such a technological marvel. They somehow manage to identify and route billions of pieces of mail and I have to imagine their tech is significantly more primitive than this. Not only that but US addresses are absurdly non-standardized, you can often write the same address multiple ways and have it deliver to the same location. I’m sure there’s plenty of published knowledge…

My father once received a letter from Algeria, with 3 words on the envelope : his first name, "Créteil" (the town where he lived, ≈100k inhabitants), and "France". Of course, in the 70s there was no Internet nor central database to find him, yet the postal service managed to deliver the letter. He was a very active social worker, managed a youth football team, etc. which made him locally well-known by his first name.…

sadly, over here in the netherlands and I assume elsewhere, the job as a postman changed drastically when they privatized. room for the human element has been all but squeezed out for profits long ago.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#135

Post by torginus »

rjzzleep wrote: post #40
andrewmutz wrote: post #35

A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european. I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.

Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...

> Americans on the other hand ...

Have realized most people are idiots and are willing to give away their and resources for a piece of paper if it has George Washington's face on it. So they've kept putting it on every piece of paper they could find.

Serious people keep pointing out that this is unsustainable, and will lead to the collapse of American society in weeks/months/years, but they've been saying that for decades and so far that hasn't happened yet.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#136

Post by bpodgursky »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #22
bpodgursky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe this story. Opus 4.8 scanned hundreds of PDFs for me recently with the worst handwriting imaginable. 100% successful, other than one record where even I could not figure out what was written.

I believe it. Makes me curious what your prompt was that got such a good result out of Opus.

I ordered it to not be lazy and to show me result 1 at a time rather than doing it in batch.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#137

Post by bongoman42 »

nik736 wrote: post #14
Insanity wrote: post #13

Recently I tied OCR with Opus 4.8. (I know, not technically right tool for the job). All I needed to do was extract dates from receipts. It got about 20% of the dates wrong yet rated all as “high confidence”. Should have probably tried a more OCR specific model

Opus is very good at OCR. Way better than the small 1-4B VLMs. If Opus failed, most likely those smaller models will fail as well.

We use Qwen 7B parameter model for this in production. It works quite well.

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#138

Post by weezing »

dominotw wrote: post #63
andrewmutz wrote: post #35

A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european. I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.

There is even like an american flag flying high in the background

Gotta pretend so they buy your stuff

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#139

Post by hikarudo »

ericyd wrote: post #77

I’ve always thought the US Postal Service is such a technological marvel. They somehow manage to identify and route billions of pieces of mail and I have to imagine their tech is significantly more primitive than this. Not only that but US addresses are absurdly non-standardized, you can often write the same address multiple ways and have it deliver to the same location. I’m sure there’s plenty of published knowledge…

Fun fact: one of Yann LeCun's first 'deep learning' projects was on OCR for postal codes (MNIST).

Re: Mistral OCR 4

#140

Post by rjzzleep »

port11 wrote: post #132
neuronic wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not why there are no leading AI, other important silicon tech, or relevant space companies in Europe. To some degree they exist but are all B-Tier in comparison to US/China. You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess. Just not the way it needs to be for this. The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future…

Have you raised venture capital? I have. It’s fine. You don’t get US-level (or even Israel/China/Singapore) seeds, but often you get a matching public investment. Germany has better matching funds, but we did alright in Belgium, and previously Portugal. Let’s stop pretending the EU can ‘fix’ this. It’s cultural, we’re simply not risk takers (on average) because a “normal” job comes with great benefits. Most of us don…

Funny you should bring up Germany, since it's an a place where a monopoly class of Notary's gets to suck you dry every time you add a new investor to your business in a reading session where the only value he brings to the table is to read the whole thing for you.
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