Anthropic Brings Claude Directly Into Excel

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We hope you're excited to discover what's new and trending in AI, ML, and data science this week.

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Dropbox Dash: Your AI Teammate for Seamless Search and Organization (3 min. read)

Dropbox Dash is an AI-powered universal search tool that connects all your apps—like Google Drive, OneDrive, and Gmail—into a single, searchable hub. It offers features like Stacks for organizing content, a Start Page for centralized access, and AI-driven chat for instant insights. Dash also includes advanced security controls, ensuring your data remains protected while enhancing productivity.

State of Generative Media Survey Report 2025 (6 min. read)

Artificial Analysis's 2025 survey reveals a surge in generative media adoption, with 78% of companies integrating AI-generated content into their workflows. Key drivers include enhanced creativity and efficiency, though challenges like ethical concerns and content authenticity persist. The report underscores the need for robust guidelines to navigate this evolving landscape.

OpenAI Might Be Testing GPT-5.1-Mini Upgrade for ChatGPT (2 min. read)

OpenAI's ChatGPT briefly displayed a "GPT-5 Mini Scout" model, hinting at a potential "GPT-5.1 Mini" upgrade. This coincided with the launch of the Company Knowledge feature for business accounts, suggesting a link between the two. An update to OpenAI's JavaScript agent library referenced "GPT-5.1 Mini," reinforcing this speculation. Notably, the model demonstrated enhanced image generation capabilities, producing an animated robot with unique design elements. While the official release date remains uncertain, these developments indicate a possible rollout in November, positioning OpenAI to stay competitive amid emerging AI benchmarks.

ChatGPT Now Let’s You Connect Your Company Knowledge (7 min. read)

OpenAI has unveiled "Company Knowledge" for ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu, enabling seamless integration with internal tools like Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub. This feature leverages GPT-5 to deliver precise, context-aware responses by accessing your organization's data, complete with clear citations for transparency. It respects existing permissions, ensuring data privacy and security. Now, ChatGPT can synthesize information across platforms, streamlining workflows and enhancing decision-making processes.

Anthropic Integrates Claude With Excel to Advance Financial Services (4 min. read)

Anthropic has supercharged Claude for Financial Services by introducing a beta Excel add-in, new real-time data connectors, and specialized Agent Skills. These enhancements empower users to seamlessly integrate Claude into Excel workflows, access live market data, and automate complex financial tasks like discounted cash flow modeling. Building on Sonnet 4.5's top performance in financial benchmarks, these updates aim to streamline critical financial operations within familiar industry tools.

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Machine Learning Systems Education
A dynamic, open-access platform dedicated to making machine learning systems education accessible and practical. Spearheaded by Harvard's Vijay Janapa Reddi, it offers over 15 chapters and 50 lab exercises, covering the entire ML lifecycle—from data processing to model deployment. With resources like the TinyTorch framework and TinyML hardware kits, it's a hands-on, community-driven initiative empowering over 100,000 learners and educators worldwide.

Stress-Testing Model Specs Reveals Character Differences Among Language Models (8 min. read)
Anthropic's latest research delves into how AI models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI handle over 300,000 scenarios involving value trade-offs. The study uncovers distinct behavioral patterns, with models prioritizing values like "ethical responsibility" or "efficiency" differently. Notably, it identifies thousands of instances where model specifications contain contradictions or ambiguities, highlighting areas for refinement in AI alignment strategies.

Under the Hood: The Tech Behind the First Agent from LinkedIn, Hiring Assistant (5 min. read)
LinkedIn's Hiring Assistant is revolutionizing recruitment by automating repetitive tasks through advanced AI. It leverages large language models for personalized workflow automation, experiential memory to adapt to recruiter preferences, and integrates seamlessly with tools like search and messaging. This human-centric design ensures recruiters remain in control, focusing on strategic, interpersonal aspects of hiring. Built responsibly, Hiring Assistant adheres to LinkedIn's AI principles, maintaining transparency and trust throughout the recruitment process.

Introducing PyTorch Native Agentic Stack (12 min. read)
Meta's latest innovation, the PyTorch Native Agentic Stack, is set to revolutionize AI development by seamlessly integrating agentic capabilities directly into PyTorch. This advancement empowers data scientists and ML engineers to build more autonomous and intelligent systems with greater efficiency.

Setting Up a Codebase for Working with Coding Agents (2 min. read)
Simon Willison shares practical advice on optimizing codebases for AI coding tools. He emphasizes the importance of robust automated tests, interactive testing capabilities, and maintaining a GitHub issues collection for seamless integration with agents like Claude Code. Interestingly, he notes that while comprehensive documentation benefits humans, LLMs can parse code directly, making extensive docs less critical for them. Additionally, he highlights the value of linters, type checkers, auto-formatters, and detailed error messages to enhance both human and agent productivity.

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TRENDING MODELS

Image-Text-to-Text
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR
⇧ 1M Downloads
DeepSeek-OCR is a 3B parameter model designed for optical character recognition tasks, enabling accurate text extraction from images. Updated three days ago, it has gained significant traction for its performance in image-to-text applications.

Text Generation
MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2
⇧ 28K Downloads
MiniMax-M2 is a compact, fast, and cost-effective MoE model (230 billion total parameters with 10 billion active parameters) built for elite performance in coding and agentic tasks.

Image-to-3D
tencent/HunyuanWorld-Mirror
⇧ 16.5k Downloads
HunyuanWorld-Mirror is an innovative model developed by Tencent for converting images into 3D representations, facilitating enhanced visual experiences. Updated three days ago, it has attracted attention for its cutting-edge approach to image-to-3D transformation.

Image-Text-to-Text
PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR-VL
⇧ 18.3k Downloads
PaddleOCR-VL is a 1.0B parameter model by PaddlePaddle, excelling in multilingual document parsing and element recognition tasks. Updated four days ago, it supports 109 languages and efficiently handles complex elements like tables and charts.

Text-to-Video
krea/krea-realtime-video
⇧ 1.6k Downloads
Krea-realtime-video is a model designed for generating videos from textual descriptions, enabling real-time text-to-video applications. Updated seven days ago, it has gained popularity for its ability to create dynamic video content from text inputs.

TRENDING AI TOOLS

• 🌿 Spinach AI: AI-powered tool for efficient meeting management and collaboration.

• 🌐 Atlas: A web browser with ChatGPT built in.

• 🚀 Build: Create and deploy machine learning models with ease using Google's AI platform.

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• Perplexity discusses strategies for mitigating prompt injection in their Comet platform.

• Intel has cut 35,500 jobs in less than two years as part of a drastic recovery effort.

• AllenAI has released olmOCR-2-7B-1025, a fine-tuned model from Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, optimized for complex OCR tasks.

• The U.S. Department of Energy forms a $1 billion supercomputer AI partnership with AMD.

That’s it for today!

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See you soon,

Andres