Comment by InsideOutSanta
24 days ago
There's a lot of criticism of Mistral being unable to compete with large model, and that's fair. But I think it dismisses what Mistral is actually doing, which is making specific capabilities available at high quality in tiny models.
I do a lot of OCR, file analysis, stuff like that. I use Mistral for that. I put 100$ into my account, and it just runs for a year without any worries about the amount of requests I make, because the cost is minuscule. That's valuable, even if it doesn't compete with Opus 4.8.
But how does it compete on OCR? I find that having good quality at a cheap price is more niche than having the best quality at 10x the cheap price, because for most use cases you want to pay a bit more if it saves you mistakes later.
It seems to heavily depend on what exactly you're transcribing, the performance/quality between them is really uneven. Some models work really well for old cursive but then fail reading 8-bit segment LCD digital fonts, vice-versa or any combination out there.
Basically, to find the answer you really need your own benchmark you run with real examples from what you want to do. Basically the same goes for anything ML nowadays as the public benchmarks cannot really be trusted to give you any sort of indication on how we'll it'd work for you.
It's really good. I didn't do any type of statistical evaluation or comparison to other models, but it's so good that it doesn't matter to me if there's an option that might be even better.
This just dropped: https://huggingface.co/baidu/Unlimited-OCR
Which can run comfortably on 12gb of vram. I gave it a whirl and it does seem pretty competitive. I wonder how that compares for your usecase
curious if you tried local LLM models for OCR, like a Gemma4, or your volume is too much for that
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i would argue it is more valuable
Yeah, I think also efforts like Docling and similar are showing that smaller, specialized models with the right tooling might be more effective (and efficient) at this than throwing everything at Opus.
They don't seem to release as much open-weights at Mistral as they used to though :)
Stupid Europoors, optimizing for making a good product, instead of optimizing for making as much money as possible /s
big AI labs make so much money because they have a good (amazing) product
Do they even _make_ actual money? https://isaiprofitable.com/ seems to disagree.
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Big AI labs aren't making money. They're buying revenue. Sure, the product is amazing, but it wouldn't be as amazing if offered at cost - which is exactly where "good enough" smaller and specialized models will survive.
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I'm not sure the "a year of document processing for under 100 USD/y" is such as great thing as you think it is (at least not for European competitiveness)... It means Mistral is essentially setting a revenue ceiling very low. OCR is a commodity at this point, and open source models, AWS, etc already do it out of the box.
Plus, you can't really build loyalty on a 100 USD/Y price tag. Since there are no switching costs holding them back, those buyers will leave the moment somebody offers a lower rate. An easily cloned, low cost tool with zero customer lock in is not a business. It is a feature.
That might sound great for the buyer (you), but it is a terrible strategy if we want a European company to compete long term against global competitors on actual product merit instead of just regulatory arbitrage.
well all commodities are like this. replace AI with milk, or plastic. It's easy for me to just move to different milk provider, this does not mean that milk industry is not a business.
And yes, its good that "its good for buyer" after all we do business so that living would be nicer, not the other way around (live to do business)
It does mean that the milk industry is a low value add commodity business where suppliers compete primarily on price and only survive due to protectionism and subsidies.
Food is important for national security so we should subsidize it, but it's a cost center. It'll never drive growth.
If that's what Mistral is aiming for, it would probably be better to give up now.
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There are three different supermarkets in my neighborhood but they all sell milk from the same two suppliers. It would actually be quite difficult for me to turn to a third brand.
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How is that different from any other model provider, though? I used to use Anthropic for 100% of my code. Now I use GLM 5.2 for half of it, and as soon as something better appears, I'll use that.