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Mistral OCR 4.1

docs.mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#161

Post by bonoboTP »

Oras wrote: post #66
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…

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.

Claude refuses to translate lyrics of songs even if it's just for your own understanding. ChatGPT allows it.

Also, Suno is so restrictive that it won't make songs of public domain 19th century poems because someone else already made a song and the lyrics are in their song database. And it won't do covers of your own uploaded humming of a novel melody because it matches "humming in an empty room" to some song fingerprint in the database.

They are all trying to avoid these lawsuits by being ridiculously overly cautious. "Your honor, look how much we went above and beyond, even when it made the product worse for legitimate use cases"

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#162

Post by whazor »

king_crimson wrote: post #3

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.

Mistral is (wisely) are changing their strategy. They switched to hosting open models and they are investing in hosting inference within EU.

Fine tuning an open model to European values is significantly cheaper than making your own model.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#163

Post by kergonath »

sgt wrote: post #123
IlikeMadison wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Fair enough. But most of the time, the figure is not used to say that Italy is more advanced than Russia, for whatever definition of advanced. It’s a check in the other direction: even if Russia does have advantages, in the grand scheme of things they are not that big.

> 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).

They did, just in the parts of Russia that are poorer and less-connected (and less powerful politically). They leveraged their huge geographical advantage to spread the pain as much as possible in the regions that don’t matter politically. It is very difficult to see their situation and argue that they are not in a war economy. The middle class in Moscow and St Petersburg are sheltered, true, but still.

> 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.

I don’t think that is likely. But then, of course Trump is making it more and more likely by the day as he insists on getting bogged down in Iran.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#164

Post by benrutter »

hadlock wrote: post #58
king_crimson wrote: post #3

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.

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.

It gets a little weird when you start thinking of AI like that, because AI is very corporately based in the US and China, but not as heavily that when from a talent position.

Demis Hassabis and Google's Deep Mind are all British in terms of location/talent, but they certainly aren't from a coorporate perspective (Deep Mind work might happen in London, but it is owned by Google, as US company)

(I don't know a lot about nuclear/aerospace industries, I'm guessing there more location centered just in virtue of being based around physical things, but I could be wrong)

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#165

Post by Zambyte »

missedthecue wrote: post #108
NicuCalcea wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest by what metric? And which model is that?

Largest by total parameters. GigaChat 3.1 Ultra: 702B

Huh, this is the first I've heard of that one. Has anyone here tried it? I assume the main appeal for those who use it is the country of origin, rather than performance?

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#167

Post by dcan »

josu wrote: post #61
ComputerPerson wrote: post #5

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…

Whats the best open OCR at the moment?

I’ve had good experiences with MinerU and PaddleOCR-VL

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#168

Post by coredog64 »

ttyyzz wrote: post #150
Oras wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anecdotal as I haven't had time for a full benchmark, but I have a dense tabular handwritten form that is pretty challenging: LLMs with vision don't do well because the content isn't English words. Textract did poorly because it was just too dense for their model (although I haven't tried recently) Whereas I tried this model and it was a champ: Reasonable Markdown format with accurate content.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#169

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #149
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your disdain for the EU is genuinely puzzling to me.

Re: Mistral OCR 4.1

#170

Post by Oras »

coredog64 wrote: post #168
ttyyzz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Anecdotal as I haven't had time for a full benchmark, but I have a dense tabular handwritten form that is pretty challenging: LLMs with vision don't do well because the content isn't English words. Textract did poorly because it was just too dense for their model (although I haven't tried recently) Whereas I tried this model and it was a champ: Reasonable Markdown format with accurate content.

faced something similar with Azure, try upscaling the page (2x or more) before sending to the OCR, it increased the accuracy a lot for tiny tables on landscape pages.
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