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Comment by mark_l_watson

1 day ago

I am rooting for Mistral with their different approach: not really competing on the largest and advanced models, instead doing custom engineering for customers and generally serving the needs of EU customers.

I found it to be the best model if you want to talk about topics philosophical. It has no problems going deep and technical while other models tend to be afraid of overshooting the comprehension of the reader.

their ocr model is goated

  • Did they make significant improvements in OCR 3? The quality I was getting from Mistral OCR 2 was nowhere near as good as what I could get from just sending the same files to Claude Sonnet via an API call.

    I have been finding Voxtral useful though.

    • Too late to edit / update my comment, but I finally tried Mistral OCR 3 tonight on a PDF file I had. Results were good, and fast... but I actually got better quality output from sending it to Haiku 4.5 instead.

      In particular, Haiku 4.5 detected some footers that were on every page and moved them to be the footer at the end of the entire document instead, so that the document read more fluently.

      I imagine Mistral OCR 3 might have an edge on speed & pricing, but in my low volume / prioritizing-quality case, seems that Claude is still better than Mistral.

  • probably yes. considering that even some of their non-ocr models can recognize my shitty handwritten math