Next Week in The Sequence:

We will publish a summary of our series about interpretability and announce a new, exciting series. We are going to dive deep into DeepSeek’s new OCR model that is making quite a bit of noise. In the opinion section we are going to explore a crazy crazy thesis: will OpenAI launch a crypto token?

Subscribe Now to Not Miss Anything:

📝 Editorial: Last Week in AI: Browsers, Coders, Context—and LangChain’s Agent Stack

This week’s AI releases feel less like isolated features and more like a quiet re‑wiring of the software stack around agents. OpenAI’s Atlas reframes the browser as an automated workspace; Anthropic’s Claude Code on the Web promotes coding agents from autocomplete to orchestrators; DeepSeek‑OCR suggests a path to scaling context without brute‑forcing token counts; and LangChain’s new $125M round—paired with LangChain/LangGraph 1.0, an Insights Agent, and a no‑code agent builder—signals that the ecosystem is standardizing the agent stack from design to deployment. Taken together, they compress the loop from goal → plan → act → audit into something teams can run continuously—and cheaply—inside normal tools.

Atlas is the cleanest articulation of “agentic browsing” we’ve seen so far. Instead of sprinkling a chatbot into a sidebar, it centers the browsing experience on intent: you describe an outcome (“renew this certificate,” “pull the last three invoices and reconcile”), and an agent navigates the open web—clicking buttons, filling forms, handling auth, and handing you traceable steps. The key design move is grounding: prompts can reference live page state (DOM, forms, resources) without screen‑scraping gymnastics, so instructions feel like talking to a capable coworker rather than a macro recorder. If Chrome’s primitives were tabs and URLs, Atlas’s are tasks and runs, with logs you can review and replay.

On the developer side, Claude Code moves coding agents into the browser as a first‑class, multi‑job console. Think less “smart autocomplete,” more “lightweight CI with a brain.” You queue work—refactors, flaky test hunts, doc generation, upgrade rehearsals—and the service manages execution, context, and diffs under explicit permissions. The win isn’t raw coding speed; it’s operational shape. By living where reviews and tickets already happen, the agent can open PRs, attach artifacts, and report progress without everyone spelunking into terminals. Security‑wise, the scoping is legible: repos, directories, and capabilities are declared and logged, making audits and rollbacks tractable.

DeepSeek‑OCR looks, at first glance, like a pure research drop, but the implications are immediately practical. By treating long documents as structured images—preserving layout, reading order, and typographic cues—it compresses sprawling inputs into a tractable number of vision tokens. For production systems, that unlocks two levers: (1) cheaper retrieval, since large corpora can be stored and indexed with compact visual embeddings; and (2) higher‑throughput prompting, where briefs, contracts, or compliance binders fit into windows that would otherwise explode inference costs. The open questions are real—math and code are sensitive to whitespace, chain‑of‑thought may degrade under optical packing—but even partial wins reallocate spend from tokens to storage and bandwidth where you control the curve.

Rounding out the week’s momentum, LangChain announced a $125M round at a $1.25B valuation and shipped a slate of “agent engineering” upgrades—LangChain and LangGraph 1.0, a new Insights Agent, and a no‑code agent builder. The funding, led by IVP with participation from existing and new strategic investors, signals that the market is consolidating around end‑to‑end stacks where agents are designed, tested, observed, and deployed with the same rigor as CI/CD. In practice: teams can model multi‑step plans as graphs, capture telemetry across runs, and promote agents from prototyping in notebooks to governed production services. That neatly complements Atlas’s browser‑native action loops and Claude Code’s repo‑scoped work queues, and it points to a near‑term standard playbook: design agents as programs, not prompts, with versioning, evals, and approval gates baked in.

If your roadmap still isolates browsing automations, code assistance, and context scaling, this week is your nudge to converge. The teams that win won’t simply pick the “best model”; they’ll design for agents that can read, act, and verify across the full life cycle—turning the web into an API, repos into workflows, and context into a solvable engineering problem. Another hot week in AI.

🔎 AI Research

FineVision: Open Data Is All You Need

Authors: Hugging Face, Technical University of Munich, Stanford University

Summary: FineVision introduces a unified, human-in-the-loop corpus of 24 million image-text samples from over 200 sources to standardize and decontaminate vision-language training data. Models trained on this clean, diverse dataset outperform prior open mixtures, establishing a new benchmark for data-centric VLM research.

QueST: Incentivizing LLMs to Generate Difficult Problems

Authors: University of Zurich, Microsoft Research

Summary: QueST trains LLMs to synthesize challenging competitive-coding problems via difficulty-aware graph sampling and rejection fine-tuning. Using 100K generated problems, it boosts smaller student models to rival large reasoning systems such as DeepSeek-R1-671B on LiveCodeBench.

Every Step Evolves: Scaling Reinforcement Learning for Trillion-Scale Thinking Model

Authors: Inclusion AI (Ling Team)

Summary: This work presents Ring-1T, the first open-weights trillion-parameter “thinking” model trained with novel RL components—IcePop, C3PO++, and ASystem—to stabilize and scale trillion-level training. Ring-1T achieves state-of-the-art results across math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks, approaching GPT-5-Thinking performance while remaining open source.

DeepSeek-OCR: Contexts Optical Compression

Authors: DeepSeek-AI

Summary: DeepSeek-OCR proposes compressing long textual contexts into visual representations through a high-efficiency encoder-decoder system, achieving over 97% OCR precision at 10× compression. It demonstrates that optical context compression could drastically reduce token usage for long-context LLMs while maintaining accuracy.

Pico-Banana-400K: A Large-Scale Dataset for Text-Guided Image Editing

Authors: Apple

Summary: Apple introduces Pico-Banana-400K, a dataset of 400,000 real-image edit pairs created using Nano-Banana and Gemini-2.5 models to benchmark instruction-based image editing. It includes multi-turn, preference, and single-turn subsets with fine-grained taxonomies and automated quality control to advance multimodal editing and alignment research .

ProfBench: Multi-Domain Rubrics Requiring Professional Knowledge to Answer and Judge

Authors: NVIDIA

Summary: NVIDIA presents ProfBench, a rubric-guided benchmark spanning physics, chemistry, finance, and consulting tasks, annotated by PhD and MBA professionals to evaluate LLM reasoning on complex, real-world problems. The benchmark introduces affordable, unbiased LLM-judge methods and reveals that even GPT-5-High achieves only 65.9% performance, highlighting major gaps in professional-domain reasoning .

🤖 AI Tech Releases

OpenAI Atlas

OpenAI officially entered the AI browser race with the release of Atlas.

Claude Code on the Web

Anthropic released a version of Claude that runs ona web browser.

Mistral AI Studio

Mistral launched its AI Studio platform to build production-ready AI applications.

SentinelStep

Microsoft open sourced SentinelStep, a mechanism for monitoring long running tasks.

Qwen DeepResearch

Qwen upgrades Deep Research so reports can be instantly published as live webpages (and even podcasts), expanding beyond static docs.

📡AI Radar

• Microsoft rolls out “Copilot Mode” in Edge, pitching it as a full AI browser that can read tabs, summarize, and take actions like booking travel.

• TensorMesh raises $4.5M to cut inference costs by squeezing more throughput from existing AI server memory/cache workflows.

• Palantir and Lumen sign a multi-year deal (over $200M) to pair Palantir AIP/Foundry with Lumen’s network fabric for enterprise AI services.

• Former Cohere research lead launches Adaptation Labs to go against pure “scale is all you need,” betting on model efficiency and new approaches over brute-force compute.

• Meta is cutting ~600 roles across its AI org as part of a broader reorg while continuing to hire for its superintelligence lab.

• Shuttle raises $6M to make “AI platform engineering” that deploys backends as fast as you code them, tackling vibe-coding’s ops gap. (Shuttle)

• LangChain becomes a unicorn at a $1.25B valuation to build its agent-engineering platform (LangChain/LangGraph/LangSmith).

• Sesame, from Oculus co-founders, raises $250M and opens a limited beta for its conversational AI + smart-glasses experience.

• Serval lands $47M to embed AI agents into IT service management and automate help-desk workflows.

• Nexos.ai grabs €30M (co-led by Index Ventures) to broker safe, governed access to many AI models for enterprises.

• 1001 (founded by a Scale AI alum) raises $9M to bring AI decision systems to critical MENA industries like aviation, logistics and energy.

• Crusoe, an OpenAI partner in data-center buildouts, is valued around $10B after raising roughly $1.38–$1.4B in new funding.

• Google Cloud and Anthropic formalize a blockbuster expansion: access to up to 1M TPUs (tens of billions of dollars) to scale Claude, coming online in 2026.

• OpenAI makes another tuck-in deal, acquiring an AI startup founded by ex-Apple staff as it broadens desktop/UI ambitions.