Mistral OCR 4.1

(docs.mistral.ai)

86 points | by spelk 1 hour ago

7 comments

  • king_crimson 44 minutes ago
    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.
    • kubb 38 minutes ago
      It's not a race. You don't get anything for winning.
      • Palpatineli 1 minute ago
        How about "being able to align ASI somewhat to your values"?
      • procgen 23 minutes ago
        The only prize is control of the light cone.
      • bpodgursky 30 minutes ago
        It's red queen. You stay alive by winning, you lose everything by losing.
      • ChrisClark 16 minutes ago
        Unless you manage to build a god, and keep it under control... okay, we're all going to lose
    • thadt 30 minutes ago
      Yeah? And here I've been a happy Transkribus customer for some time now. If there are better models or interfaces out there for analyzing historical handwriting, I'll definitely take a look.
  • merb 42 minutes ago
    1000 Pages / 3.5€ this is expensive as hell. If this is not fastly superior than something like tesseract it is not worth it.
  • ComputerPerson 41 minutes ago
    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 perform better. It's worth mentioning that even the highest-end models do a pretty poor job with intricate text like mine.

    • rtaylorgarlock 30 minutes ago
      Yet: how is pricing? Evaluating contents and routing appropriately isn't a new challenge in OCR, one of the oldest fields of applications in ML. Thus, how do the smaller open models perform in tandem with relatively pricy $/pg models & APIs? Your use case is remarkably rare relative to the volume and price sensitivity of enterprise data warehouse ops.
      • ComputerPerson 18 minutes ago
        I won't pretend to have any idea. My "benchmark" is very application-specific.

        People seem to be complaining about the price, but I wouldn't be so quick to judge considering the advertised capabilities.

    • petcat 36 minutes ago
      > the "pro" models from OpenAI dominate. Not surprising considering the price difference, but it would ne nice if an OCR-specific model could do better.

      I haven't been impressed with any of Mistral's models. They obviously realized that they couldn't compete at the frontier so they decided to go for smaller focused models but even those have not been that good.

  • mainecoder 44 minutes ago
    The chinese did it better, mistral is alive thanks to regulations.
    • mangecoeur 5 minutes ago
      i.e. it's one AI company that's basically guaranteed to never fail since it has a market niche guaranteed by European companies and governments.
      • petcat 0 minutes ago
        Which is also why their most recent model "Shieldstral" does nothing except monitor and moderate internet content.

        After stuff like Chat Control I think they're obviously seeing a big demand for this kind of "internet safety" technology in Europe.

    • rtaylorgarlock 29 minutes ago
      I've been a bit more careful about complaining about regulations broadly due to competitive advantage, e.g. ITAR
  • Johnny_Bonk 24 minutes ago
    How does this compare to Baidu Unlimited OCR. I've been very impressed with Baidu and it's essentially free to run on a decent computer, other than electricity costs.
    • spiderfarmer 21 minutes ago
      Where do your documents go?
      • rescbr 13 minutes ago
        They go to the decent computer hosting the model, which can be yours if you pay the electricity costs
  • ianhawes 26 minutes ago
    I won't comment on accuracy, but in internal benchmarks, Mistral OCR is significantly faster than comparable APIs.
  • maz1b 24 minutes ago
    How does this compare to 4?