Mistral AI launched a new OCR API that processes PDFs into a nicely ordered Markdown file

For years, companies, governments and researchers have faced a persistent challenge: extracting usable data from PDF files. These digital documents contain vital information, from scientific research to government records, but their rigid format often turns that information into an impenetrable maze for machines.The PDF problem and its structure PDFs were originally designed as a digital reflection of printed documents, making them visually attr…

Mistral AI launched a new OCR API that processes PDFs into a nicely ordered Markdown file

Mistral AI, perhaps the most notable European AI startup, launched this week a document understanding API that processes PDF files with OCR and generates a Markdown document that interleaves text and images. Expectedly, the company's main target is retrieval-augmented generation or RAG. While PDF has become the standard format for complex, multimodal documents like slide sets or scientific papers with equations or figures, this file format is no…