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  ericyd
  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 in this area, but 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.
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  andrewmutz
  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.
• beklein
  All AI labs really need to stop using truncated y-axes for benchmark bar charts...https://mistral.ai/_astro/cm-engish_ZhlvoT.webp?dpl=6a3a94bd...
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  themanmaran
  It's cheap at $4/1k, but I'm hesitant to even benchmark this one again since the previous versions were all "98% accurate based on internal benchmarks of 4 pdfs" and ended up falling short of almost everything else on the market [1].Even in this one, they just report that OlmOCRBench and OmniDocBench have "known limitations" and that's why they report flagship numbers from their internal benchmark.https://getomni.ai/blog/benchmarking-open-source-models-for-...
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  sreekanth850
  Tested with Malayalam, normal handwriting got accurate but a slight different style got detected as kannada. Have samples if required, which sarvam got done with 99% accuracy leaving one text error.
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  mdrzn
  It'll be interesting to see how this ranks against https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR
• trilogic
  Mistral keeps reminding us that doesn´t just brew great coffee they can build great AI too. Hats off to the team. Mistral O.C.R. (Only Cool Results)
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  bastawhiz
  The comparisons rank it against GPT and Gemini but not Claude. Is Claude's vision support simply not competitive when it comes to OCR tasks?
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  utopiah
  "A note on out-of-scope use. OCR 4 is a document-understanding model, not a decision-maker. It is not intended for medical diagnosis, legal advice or judgment, high-stakes financial decisions, safety-critical systems, real-time/latency-sensitive processing, or non-document inputs (raw audio, video, etc.). "Can't wait for the "oh so innovative" manager who will suggest during the next meeting "Ok... but what if WE used it for high-stakes financial decisions on non-document inputs like a photo from my phone?"I guarantee you somebody on HN is going to comment about this "idea" next week.
• mcbetz
  Little on differences other than bounding boxes and double the price compared to their previous OCR v3 model from December - https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3/ - other benchmarks were used back then.
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  Insanity
  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
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  Ducki
  I was processing 55 year old paper files, most of them severely degraded, with its predecessor model. I was very impressed! I also tried Abbyy Finereader but it didn't even come close in my experience.
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  MostlyStable
  Does anyone know of OCR benchmarks that include hand-written documents? I'm currently using Gemini pro 3 for this, and error rates are quite good, but it's a little bit pricey, and I'd be interested in a cheaper model that could perform as well, but almost all the OCR benchmarks I'm aware of (and I believe all the ones included in this announcement) are about printed/typeset text.
• JGB100
  Not well tested. It switched all U.S. (") double quotation marks to UK-style (') single quotation marks, ignoring the source document. Useless in the US.
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  pmxi
  This has been a niche where Mistral has actually been successful. Btw, Hindi and Japanese are bucketed in "Rare Languages," which is odd.
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  stri8ted
  Way too expensive. Google vision OCR (which they failed to compare against), is $1.50 per 1k pages. Vs $4 from Mistral.
• coulix
  I wonder how it does compare to reducto, pulse, extendai.
• Ninjinka
  Is there a complete list of the languages they support, and benchmarks by language, instead of just "Rare Languages"?
• mrkn1
  This runs for free on CPU https://github.com/kouhxp/textsnap
• tdubey
  Are there benchmarks for how this performs on charts, or maybe more accurately, plots? I've yet to find a model that can digitize a plot into X,Y points with some accuracy in my use case of digitizing old datasheets.
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  jppope
  Is there something wrong with their certificate? Chromium is saying https isn't valid
• sscaryterry
  Why the chart crimes?!
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  ge96
  1000 pages for $4? damn how does it compare to llama parse I wonder
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  gpm
  Do these models (this one or its competitors) do handwriting recognition?
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  v3ss0n
  Not opensource right?
• dominotw
  starting y axis from 50 and 95 is a bit mileading
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  greenleafone7
  After paying for Mistral and using it for a while I genuinely hated it. It's a productivity black hole and can't realistically compete with anyone. I chose it only because it was European, but no. I'd rather let my one year subscription go to waste than use anything 'Mistral'.