alt Hacker NewsMistral OCR 4.1
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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.
For anyone interested, I have an ocr pipeline running on rented GPUs, doing around 1000pages for 0.05-01 usd with around 0.8 seconds per page with full bounding boxes support for grounding.
If you’re interested you can find contact to me via this profile.
3.5 usd/1000 pages is just too expensive…
1000 Pages / 3.5€ this is expensive as hell. If this is not fastly superior than something like tesseract it is not worth it.
The VLM's are so good at complex document understanding now. But you just can't trust them not to invisibly censor sensitive clinical/legal docs, even at the maximally permissive settings.
And the deep learning OCR-only models won't censor, but can and do hallucinate. I've yet to see a 'scan with different approaches and reconcile and say you're not sure if they don't agree' system just work for generic complex documents.
Benchmarks? I'm currently using Tesseract (via OcrMyPDF) and would like to compare the difference.
I think people misunderstand the utility of Mistral's OCR. It's not going to beat SOTA models for extraction on edge-case docs, but it's MUCH cheaper and faster and does an excellent job on simple ones. I've been working on converting PDFs to EPUBs and Mistral has been making steady improvements. On a chapter of Bleak House it was able to extract and tag the header, titles, and references at the bottom every time. The only thing it struggled on was line numbers in the right margin which it correctly tagged as "aside text" 3/5 times, but always separated from the core text each time. The important thing to keep in mind is that there's no prompting needed, just upload the PDF and voila!. There's even a batch mode with a 50% discount.
Does anyone know a site that lets you browse examples of input / output pairs?, particularly with layout analysis (bounding boxes of figures, tables, etc).
Mistral has been very good with handwritten ocr, expecting the new models to get better with that across languages.
I won't comment on accuracy, but in internal benchmarks, Mistral OCR is significantly faster than comparable APIs.
Given the latest vibe release's new "follow default" model option, we should see a new coding / general Mistral model, mistral 4, soon.
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.
I've been experimenting with using NuExtract this week on locally OCRing bank statements that don't have a predefined document structure. It's way better than Tesseract or a generic vision-enabled model. It runs great on a single RTX 4090 at the modest throughput I need.
Their hosted, API-based service is something like a third of the cost of this model.
I'm wondering if this model performs better on french (and other european languages) documents than others
I didn't quite understand.
Mistral is bumping the price of this thing every release. I think we're at 2x now?
How does this compare to 4?
The chinese did it better, mistral is alive thanks to regulations.
How does this perform with non-Latin and non-LTR scripts? Say, Chinese, Arabic, Devangari, Adlam, etc.?
Who the hell at Mistral thinks it is a good idea to register CMD + T as a shortcut for switching theme!?
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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.