Weekly AI Digest: Next-Gen AI Alliance, Anthropic Raises $3.5B, and Mistral’s OCR API

Week 10, 2025

Welcome to this week’s AI Digest! This edition covers OpenAI’s latest advancements, a massive funding round for Anthropic, Google’s AI-powered upgrade to Colab, and Opera’s new AI browser assistant. We’ll also check Mistral’s OCR API and celebrate the winners of the prestigious Turing Award.

Finally, our Paper of the Week explores Shapley Values and their role in explainable AI. Let’s dive in!

OpenAI Unveils Next-Gen AI

OpenAI has unveiled NextGenAI, a first-of-its-kind consortium bringing together 15 leading research institutions to accelerate AI-driven breakthroughs and transform education. Backed by a $50M investment in research grants, compute funding, and API access, the initiative aims to democratize AI’s potential across academia.

Notable partners include Caltech, Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and Duke University, among others. The program will support diverse applications, from healthcare and digital libraries to AI-powered education.

➡️ Read more: OpenAI’s Next-Gen AI

Anthropic Raises $3.5 Billion to Compete with OpenAI

Anthropic has secured $3.5 billion in new funding, fueling its ambitious AI research and development. With backers like Bessemer Venture Partners, Cisco Investments and D1 Capital Partners, the company is poised to accelerate its work on Claude models and challenge OpenAI’s dominance.

This funding marks one of the largest investments in AI to date, signaling continued confidence in generative AI’s future. Anthropic valuation is now a whooping 61.5B!

➡️ Read more: Anthropic’s $3.5B Funding

Opera Integrates AI into Its Browser

Opera has launched a new AI-powered browsing agent designed to improve web navigation and improve search experiences.

This move aligns with a broader industry trend where browsers become AI-augmented personal assistants. Expect features like smarter tab management, real-time page summaries, and contextual recommendations.

➡️ Read more: Opera’s AI Browser Agent

Mistral’s OCR API Converts PDFs into Markdown

Mistral has introduced a OCR API capable of converting PDF documents into AI-ready markdown files.

This tool improves document processing by making structured data extraction more efficient, benefiting researchers, legal professionals, and enterprises dealing with large document repositories.

➡️ Read more: Mistral’s OCR API

Turing Award Winners Announced

Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton, pioneers in reinforcement learning, have been awarded the Turing Award for their foundational contributions to AI.

Their work has significantly influenced modern AI applications, from robotics to LLM training and game-playing agents like AlphaGo.

➡️ Read more: Turing Award Winners

Paper of the Week: Shapley Values in AI Explainability

Shapley Values (SV) have become a staple in explainable AI, especially for feature attribution and data valuation. Shapley Interactions (SIs) extend these concepts, offering deeper insights into complex machine learning models.

This week’s featured paper introduces shapiq, a Python package that helps compute Shapley Values and Interactions across diverse ML models, including transformers, XGBoost, and LightGBM.

If you work in AI explainability, this is a must-read.

➡️ Explore the research: Paper and shapiq GitHub Repository

Why This Matters

With OpenAI’s next-gen model, Anthropic’s massive funding, and AI integration into everyday tools like web browsers and Colab, the AI landscape is continue to evolve and entering every major aspect of our lives.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts — drop a comment or share your insights on these AI advancements. And stay tuned for next week’s digest!