Mistral OCR 3
16 comments
·December 18, 2025Tiberium
From a tweet: https://x.com/i/status/2001821298109120856
> can someone help folks at Mistral find more weak baselines to add here? since they can't stomach comparing with SoTA....
> (in case y'all wanna fix it: Chandra, dots.ocr, olmOCR, MinerU, Monkey OCR, and PaddleOCR are a good start)
belval
I've worked on document extraction a lot and while the tweet is too flippant for my taste, it's not wrong. Mistral is comparing itself to non-VLM computer vision services. While not necessarily what everyone needs, they are a very different beasts compared to VLM based extraction because it gives you precise bounding boxes, usually at the cost of larger "document understanding".
Its failure mode are also vastly different. VLM-based extraction can misread entire sentences or miss entire paragraphs. Sonnet 3 had that issue. Computer vision models instead will make in-word typos.
pzo
there has been so many open source OCR in the last 3 months that would be good to compare to those especially when some are not even 1B params and can be run on edge devices.
- paddleOCR-VL
- olmOCR-2
- chandra
- dots.ocr
I kind of miss there is not many leaderboard sections or arena for OCR and CV and providers hosting those. Neglected on both Artificial Analysis and OpenRouter.
pzo
what I like in MistralOCR is that they have simple pricing $1/1k pages and API hosted on their servers. With other OCR is hard to compare pricing because are token based and you don't know how many tokens is the image unless you run your own test.
E.g. with Gemini 3.0 flash you might seem that model pricing increased only slightly comparing to Gemini 2.5 flash until you test it and will see that what used to be 258 per 384x384 input tokens now is around 3x more.
hereme888
I'm reading worse performance than many OSS offerings like Paddle, MinerU, MonkeyOCR, etc:
petcat
It seems like Mistral is just chasing around sort of "the fringes" of what could be useful AI features. Are they just getting out-classed by OAI, Google, Anthropic?
It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested in Mistral's development, but it doesn't seem like they are.
tensor
Form processing is vastly more useful than meme generation. When people need to do real work this is the sort of tool they are going to reach for.
sbuttgereit
Yep. I saw the title and got excited.... this is a particular problem area where I think these things can be very effective. There are so many data entry class tasks which don't require huge knowledge or judgement... just clear parsing and putting that into a more machine digestible form.
I don't know... feels like this sort of area, while not nearly so sexy as video production or coding or (etc.)... but seems like reaching a better-than-human performance level should be easier for these kinds of workloads.
bee_rider
Following the leaders too closely seems like a bad move, at least until a profitable business model for an AI model training company is discovered. Mistral’s models are pretty good, right? I mean they don’t have all the scaffolding around them that something like chatGPT does, but building all that scaffolding could be wasted effort until a profitable business model is shown.
Until then, they seem to be able to keep enough talent in the EU to train reasonably good models. The kernel is there, which seems like the attainable goal.
BoredPositron
I guess it's better to do the same stuff everyone else is doing?
VWWHFSfQ
I think there is a lot of broad support, but they're just kind of hamstrung by EU regulation on AI development at this stage. I think the end game will ultimately be getting acquired by an American company, and then relocating.
tensor
I hope the EU blocks any acquisitions by American companies. The west needs to start protecting its strategic assets.
lawlessone
>It seems like EU in general should be heavily invested
Maybe, i think it will be to our benefit when the bubble pops that we are not heavily invested, no harm investing a little.
film42
Is open router still sending all OCR jobs to Mistral? I wonder if they're trying to keep that spot. Seems like Mistral and Google are the best at OCR right now, with Google leading Mistral by a fair bit.
i just gave it a quick spin on my fav documents. quick check:
- table entries hallucinated - tables messed up (tables merged, forgot rows) - forgot to parse some text passages
if you are doing something serious, i would not use it