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Mistral OCR

mistral.ai

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Re: Mistral OCR

#181

Post by themanmaran »

bob1029 wrote: post #109
themanmaran wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if the PDFs are unknown or were created by way of a cellphone camera, multifunction office device, etc should you need to reach for OCR. It's always safer to OCR on every file. Sometimes you'll have a "clean" pdf that has a screenshot of an Excel table. Or a scanned image that has already been OCR'd by a lower quality tool (like the built in Adobe OCR). And if you rely on this you're going to get pretty unpred…

It's not guessing if the form is known and you can read the information directly. This is a common scenario at many banks. You can expect nearly perfect metadata for anything pushed into their document storage system within the last decade.

Oh yea if the form is known and standardized everything is a lot easier.

But we work with banks on our side, and one of the most common scenarios is customers uploading financials/bills/statements from 1000's of different providers. In which case it's impossible to know every format in advance.

Re: Mistral OCR

#183

Post by risyachka »

kbyatnal wrote: post #140

We're approaching the point where OCR becomes "solved" — very exciting! Any legacy vendors providing pure OCR are going to get steamrolled by these VLMs. However IMO, there's still a large gap for businesses in going from raw OCR outputs —> document processing deployed in prod for mission-critical use cases. LLMs and VLMs aren't magic, and anyone who goes in expecting 100% automation is in for a surprise. You still n…

>> Any legacy vendors providing pure OCR are going to get steamrolled by these VLMs.

-OR- they can just use these APIs, and considering that they have a client base - which would prefer to not rewrite integrations to get the same result - they can get rid of most code base, replace it with llm api and increase margins by 90% and enjoy good life.

Re: Mistral OCR

#185

Post by ks2048 »

pilooch wrote: post #158

But what's the need exactly for OCR when you have multimodal LLMs that can read the same info and directly answer any questions about it ? For a VLLM, my understanding is that OCR corresponds to a sub-field of questions, of the type 'read exactly what's written in this document'.

Tons of uses: Storage (text instead of images), search (user typing in a text box and you want instant retrieval from a dataset), etc. And costs: run on images once - then the rest of your queries will only need to run on text.

Re: Mistral OCR

#186

Post by simonw »

pilooch wrote: post #158

But what's the need exactly for OCR when you have multimodal LLMs that can read the same info and directly answer any questions about it ? For a VLLM, my understanding is that OCR corresponds to a sub-field of questions, of the type 'read exactly what's written in this document'.

The biggest risk of vision LLMs for OCR is that they might accidentally follow instructions is the text that they are meant to be processing.

(I asked Mistral if their OCR system was vulnerable to this and they said "should be robust, but curious to see if you find any fun examples" - https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1897713755741368434 and https://twitter.com/sophiamyang/status/1897719199595720722 )

Re: Mistral OCR

#187

Post by climb_stealth »

Does this support Japanese? They list a table of language comparisons againat other approaches but I can't tell if it is exhaustive.

I'm hoping that something like this will be able to handle 3000-page Japanese car workshop manuals. Because traditional OCR really struggles with it. It has tables, graphics, text in graphics, the whole shebang.

Re: Mistral OCR

#188

Post by hyuuu »

It's a weird timing because I just launched https://dochq.io - ai document extraction where you can define what you need to get out your documents in plain English, I legitimately thought that this was going to be such a niche product but hell, there has been a very rapid rise for AI-based OCR lately, an article/tweet even went viral 2 weeks ago I think? About using Gemini to do OCR, fun times.

Re: Mistral OCR

#190

Post by janis1234 »

cxie wrote: post #40

The new Mistral OCR release looks impressive - 94.89% overall accuracy and significantly better multilingual support than competitors. As someone who's built document processing systems at scale, I'm curious about the real-world implications. Has anyone tried this on specialized domains like medical or legal documents? The benchmarks are promising, but OCR has always faced challenges with domain-specific terminology…

$1 for 1000 pages seems high to me. Doing a google search

Rent and Reserve NVIDIA A100 GPU 80GB - Pricing Starts from $1.35/hour

I just don't know if in 1 hour and with a A100 I can process more than a 1000 pages. I'm guessing yes.

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