# ThursdAI — Full AI Release Archive

> Every AI release covered on the ThursdAI podcast, by month. 953 releases. Human version: https://thursdai.news/releases

# Everything AI Released in September 2026

> 22 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-09


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba Qwen — Qwen3.8-Max-0902 (Sep 3, 2026)

Alibaba refreshed its API-only frontier model with a September 2 snapshot: 2.4T parameters, 1M context, $2/$6 per million tokens, and a claimed #1 on Code Arena. The ThursdAI panel was skeptical of the WebDev leaderboard claim given the rest of the week and could not name a production Qwen Max user beyond dataset generation.

**2.4T** parameters · **1M** context window · **$2 / $6** per million input / output tokens

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2094968708288680276)
- [Code Arena claim](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2094982928371794077)
- [QwenCloud model page](https://www.qwencloud.com/models/qwen3.8-max-0902)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-qwen-3-8-max-0902)

### Anthropic — Claude Fable 5.1 & Mythos 5.1 (Sep 3, 2026)

Anthropic shipped Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 as the same weights with different guardrails. Fable 5.1 scores 55.8 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (up from 42.0 for Fable 5, versus about 37 for GPT-5.6 Sol) and 52% on the new Terminal-Bench Science, more than double Fable 5. Cache reads drop 75% to $0.25/M while input/output stay at $10/$50 per million tokens. The prompting guide now names the Opus 5 jargon style 'mannered prose' so it can be prompted away; Peter Gostev's Code Arena tests put the max version first by a large margin.

**55.8** Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Fable 5: 42.0) · **52%** Terminal-Bench Science · **$0.25/M** cache reads, down 75% · **$10 / $50** per million input / output tokens

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2094848572143407483)
- [Anthropic blog](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-fable-and-mythos-5-1)
- [System card thread](https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2094851784779108683)
- [Writing density / mannered prose guide](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt-engineering/prompting-claude-fable-5-1#writing-density)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-fable-5-1-mythos-5-1)

### fal — MiniMax H3 Max Turbo (Sep 3, 2026)

fal's Turbo variant of MiniMax H3 Max keeps about 97% of H3 Max quality, generates a clip in 1.4 seconds, and costs one cent per second at 768p, about 50% cheaper. Alex's live test found it no longer renders copyrighted characters the way H3 Max did.

**$0.01/sec** price at 768p · **1.4s** generation time · **~97%** of H3 Max quality

- [Turbo announcement (X)](https://x.com/fal/status/2095210540083884453)
- [fal set Alex straight](https://x.com/altryne/status/2095667118561968551)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-fal-h3-max-turbo)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.8 Flash (Sep 3, 2026)

Google's third Flash iteration in as many weeks, billed as the reasoning and coding workhorse for Googlers who all build on Antigravity internally. It scores 54.9 on HLE-Verified, keeps a 1M-token context, is about 3x faster, and is priced at $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens until a doubling on January 1, 2027. The Wall Street Journal reported Google scrapped the 3.5 Pro checkpoints because Flash overtook them; Gemini 4 is still in post-training.

**54.9** HLE-Verified · **$0.75 / $3.75** per million tokens until Jan 1, 2027 · **1M** context window

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Google/status/2095175518068904380)
- [Gemini API pricing](https://ai.google.dev/pricing)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-gemini-3-8-flash)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber (Sep 3, 2026)

A dedicated cybersecurity variant of Gemini 3.8 Flash, available only to trusted defenders through Google's Fairwind program. The newsletter lists CWE-Bench at 47.2%; no benchmark numbers surfaced during the show, and Alex questioned who will actually get to use it.

**47.2%** CWE-Bench

- [Cyber thread (X)](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2095196704769237137)
- [Fairwind program](https://deepmind.google/fairwind-program/)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-gemini-3-8-flash-cyber)

### Inworld — Realtime TTS-2 (Sep 3, 2026)

Inworld's real-time text-to-speech model is generally available with sub-100ms latency at $25 per million characters. It ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis's Controlled Voice Arena and #4 on the Provider arena.

**<100ms** latency · **$25/M** per million characters · **#1** AA Controlled Voice Arena

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/inworld_ai/status/2095186020677353488)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-tldr)

### Meta AI — Muse Spark 1.3 (Sep 3, 2026)

Spark 1.3 xhigh scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, tying GPT-5.6 Sol and Grok 4.6, and a limited-preview max reasoning mode scores 62, tying Claude Fable 5, the first time Meta has jumped over OpenAI, Microsoft MAI, and Google on that index. Pricing is unchanged at $1.25/$4.25 per million; it runs about 3x faster than Fable and Sol at roughly 4x lower cost than Sol. MRCR long-context jumped from 66% to 98.5% at 1M tokens, and a contributor tier charges $0.10/$0.20 per million if Meta can train on your prompts. Open weights and a mystery 'Watermelon' model are teased as coming soon.

**61 / 62** AA Intelligence Index, xhigh / max · **98.5%** MRCR long context at 1M tokens · **$1.25 / $4.25** per million input / output tokens · **$0.10 / $0.20** contributor tier per million tokens

- [Zuck announcement](https://x.com/finkd/status/2095232032896946311)
- [Artificial Analysis analysis](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2095247787277553929)
- [Artificial Analysis model page](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/muse-spark)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-meta-muse-spark-1-3)

### Meta AI — Muse Voice Transcribe (Sep 3, 2026)

Meta's streaming speech-to-text model handles transcription, speaker diarization, and endpointing in a single model, claims 3.1% streaming WER, and is API only. It costs about 18 cents per hour, supports a custom dictionary (it transcribes 'ThursdAI' correctly), and powers the live diarized transcript on thursdai.news/live, where Alex says it beats Descript on names and terms.

**3.1%** streaming WER (claimed) · **$0.18/hr** price per hour of audio

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2094839236016976028)
- [Architecture thread](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2094839238495801457)
- [Zuck post](https://x.com/finkd/status/2094836602681938385)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-meta-muse-voice-transcribe)

### Microsoft AI — MAI-Transcribe-2 (Sep 3, 2026)

Microsoft AI's second transcription model ranks #2 on the Artificial Analysis WER leaderboard at 2.0%, runs about 400x real time, and costs $1.67 per 1,000 minutes, less than half the price of its peers. It ships real-time ASR with diarization the same week as Meta's Muse Voice Transcribe.

**2.0%** WER, #2 on Artificial Analysis · **400x** real time · **$1.67** per 1,000 minutes

- [Launch (X)](https://x.com/MicrosoftAI/status/2095521860184363074)
- [Artificial Analysis thread](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2095521214777442546)
- [Speech-to-text leaderboard](https://artificialanalysis.ai/speech-to-text)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-tldr)

### OpenAI — GPT-6 Astra (Sep 3, 2026)

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3, 2026, live during the ThursdAI stream, with president Greg Brockman telling reporters 'welcome to the AGI era.' OpenAI reports 99.9 on ARC-AGI-3, 97.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 72.6% on OSWorld 2.0, 92.7 on ScreenSpot Pro and 64.6 on Terminal-Bench Science, and Axios reported it was trained on 100,000 GPUs at Stargate Abilene. API pricing is $10/$50 per million tokens (same as Fable 5.1, 2.5x Sol's promotional price) with a Fast mode at 2x the price, available in the OpenAI API and Amazon Bedrock, rolling out from a limited set of organizations to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Artificial Analysis scored it 61 on its Intelligence Index, tied with Sol and behind Fable 5.1, but about 70% more token efficient than Sol.

**99.9** ARC-AGI-3 (Sol was 7%) · **97.6%** FrontierMath Tier 4 · **72.6%** OSWorld 2.0 · **$10 / $50** per million input / output tokens · **100,000** GPUs in the Stargate Abilene training run

- [OpenAI: Introducing GPT-6 Astra](https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/)
- [Launch post (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2095595741528125780)
- [Availability](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2095595757072191802)
- [Computer use](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2095595744300503356)
- [Artificial Analysis thread](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2095595489031000350)
- Podcast coverage: [Sep 3 Part 2: Welcome to AGI - OpenAI unveils GPT-6 Astra, 99% on Arc-AGI and incredible at computer use.](https://thursdai.news/ep/astra#sec-breaking-brockman-agi)

### Runway — GWM Worlds 2 (Sep 3, 2026)

Runway's second generative world model runs in real time at 720p and 24 fps with open-ended sessions, 48 kHz audio, and generated speech, a big jump over the low-fidelity audio in most world models. LDJ broke it live on the show two days after Runway's previous world model. Research preview.

**24 fps @ 720p** real-time generation · **48 kHz** audio

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/runwayml/status/2095540014645920040)
- [Runway research](https://runway.com/research)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-runway-solaris-gwm-worlds-2)

### Runway — Solaris (Sep 3, 2026)

Solaris generates interfaces as video, so every element in a scene is clickable and draggable: click a lamp and the room lights up, drag shoes onto a person and he wears them. In Runway's own study the generated behavior was preferred 61 to 24 over Opus 5 (71% preferred it over coded UI). Research preview, no public access yet.

**61 to 24** preferred over Opus 5 in Runway's study

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/runwayml/status/2094463070466646019)
- [Cristóbal Valenzuela](https://x.com/agermanidis/status/2094466649399451768)
- [Introducing Solaris](https://runway.com/news/research/introducing-solaris)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-runway-solaris-gwm-worlds-2)

### Tencent — Hy4 preview (Sep 3, 2026)

Tencent open-sourced a 770B-parameter MoE with 49B active, 1M context, and an Apache 2.0 license. Its Sherry quantization takes the weights from 1.5 TB to 214 GB at 2.38 bits per weight. Nisten, who works on one-bit models at Prism ML, said 2-bit quants of large models stay useful but can drop multilingual and other capabilities, so test for your use case.

**770B / 49B** total / active parameters · **214 GB** Sherry quant at 2.38 bpw (from 1.5 TB) · **1M** context window

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/TencentAI_News/status/2093232936434954659)
- [Sherry quantization](https://x.com/TencentAI_News/status/2094706773047550057)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy4-preview)
- [Research page](https://hy.tencent.ai/research/hy4-preview)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-open-source-llms)

### World Labs — Atlas (Sep 3, 2026)

Atlas is pretrained from scratch to natively operate in text, images, video, and 3D as an autoregressive diffusion transformer. From 1 to 6 images it generates up to a minute of 1440p camera-controlled video and a 3D reconstruction with no Gaussian splats, and it can reframe real video from new angles, producing bullet-time from three ordinary tripods. LDJ noted quality scales with more camera angles. Partner access only for now.

**1 to 6** input images · **1 min @ 1440p** max generation · **3** phones for bullet time

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/theworldlabs/status/2094839756329041984)
- [Atlas blog](https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/atlas)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-world-labs-atlas)

## Products & Apps

### CoreWeave — Kimi K3 on Dedicated Inference (Sep 3, 2026)

CoreWeave added Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 to Dedicated Inference, running on GB300 NVL72 systems. Alex says it 'purrs like a kitten' and a token promotion is planned on the CoreWeave and W&B accounts.

**2.8T** Kimi K3 parameters

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/CoreWeave/status/2094404129917452402)
- [Deploy Kimi K3 docs](https://docs.coreweave.com/products/inference/tutorials/deploy-kimi-k3)
- [Dedicated Inference](https://www.coreweave.com/products/dedicated-inference)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

### fal — fal.live (Sep 3, 2026)

After fal's infinite Rick and Morty 'interdimensional cable' stream was banned from Twitch and then Kick for copyright, the team built its own streaming site over a weekend with a model tuned for continuous generation. Viewers vote on where the anime and other channels go next. Alex credits it with inspiring the thursdai.news/live build.

- [fal.live launch (X)](https://x.com/fal/status/2094286082275696082)
- [Rehan on the stream](https://x.com/rehan_shei/status/2094592006181802174)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-fal-h3-max-turbo)

### Meta AI — Muse Code (Sep 3, 2026)

Meta's coding agent is out of beta with plans at $5, $20, and $50 per month, a TypeScript SDK preview, and a contributor tier at $0.10/$0.20 per million tokens for users who let Meta train on their prompts and completions. Wolfram plans to run an open-source development bot on it to save tokens while keeping private data on another model.

**$5 / $20 / $50** monthly plans · **$0.10 / $0.20** contributor tier per million tokens

- [Zuck announcement](https://x.com/finkd/status/2094500475710099945)
- [Pricing thread](https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2094504920049504709)
- [Meta developer blog](https://developer.meta.com/ai/resources/blog/muse-code-new-plans-and-features/)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-agents-tools)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Background computer use (Sep 3, 2026)

Claude can now drive the computer in the background from the Claude app, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. Alex noted an odd restriction: it refuses to type into applications it classifies as IDEs, so it could not talk to his Cursor agents.

- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-agents-tools)

### OpenAI — Codex with GPT-6 Astra (Sep 3, 2026)

With GPT-6 Astra, Codex can keep notes across context windows and search earlier messages and tool output instead of relying on compaction, and it can ask the user a question without stopping work that does not depend on the answer. The feature ships experimentally behind a config.toml setting and OpenAI says it will become the Astra default in the coming weeks. A new Codex harness using Astra completed Mind2Web tasks 1.9x faster than the Sol-based setup, and Astra reports MRCR long-context scores of 100% at 256K-512K and 96.3% at 512K-1M.

**1.9x** faster on Mind2Web with the new harness · **96.3%** MRCR at 512K-1M context

- [Codex changes and long context (Andrew Curran)](https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2095596143757697355)
- Podcast coverage: [Sep 3 Part 2: Welcome to AGI - OpenAI unveils GPT-6 Astra, 99% on Arc-AGI and incredible at computer use.](https://thursdai.news/ep/astra#sec-codex-computer-use-benchmarks)

## APIs & Platforms

### Abliteration AI — abliterated-model-large-v2 (Sep 3, 2026)

Abliteration AI released abliterated-model-large-v2, Z.ai's GLM-5.3 with refusals removed via abliteration, as a hosted API on US servers at $5 per million tokens ($0.50 cached). Only self-harm and CSAM remain blocked; the lab reports completed exploit tasks rising from 29 to 105 versus the refusing model. Its anonymous founder told ThursdAI the early market is red-teaming enterprise agent fleets, cyber startups, and trust-and-safety tooling, and that they do not do KYC.

**$5 / $0.50** per million tokens, uncached / cached · **29 → 105** completed exploit tasks vs the refusing model

- [Launch post (X)](https://x.com/abliteration_ai/status/2094458081451393287)
- [What is abliteration](https://docs.abliteration.ai/what-is-abliteration)
- [Pricing](https://docs.abliteration.ai/pricing)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-abliteration-ai-interview)

## Dev Tools

### OpenClaw — OpenClaw 2.0 (Sep 3, 2026)

The open-source agent framework's 2.0 release adds native computer use through Cua's driver, cloud fleets, a gateway, and platform support spanning Mac, Linux, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android, Wear OS, and Docker, after 16,977 pull requests. The ThursdAI panel and chat noted many users have since moved to Codex Mobile and Claude Mobile.

**16,977** pull requests in 2.0

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/openclaw/status/2094266903204434431)
- [Cua on the integration](https://x.com/trycua/status/2094473860137832942)
- [OpenClaw 2.0 blog](https://openclaw.ai/blog/openclaw-2-accidentally)
- Podcast coverage: [Welcome to AGI part 1 - Fable 5.1, Muse Spark beats Sol, 3 new world models blow our minds](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-03-2026#sec-agents-tools)

## Papers & Research

### OpenAI — GPT-6 Astra system card (Sep 3, 2026)

OpenAI's system card for GPT-6 Astra reports 2% on its internal computer-use safety benchmark (down from 22% for GPT-5.6 Sol), zero attempts to attack outside the sandbox on Exploit Gym Honeypot, the metric created after the July 2026 swarm incident where Sol attacked roughly half the time, and FrontierCyber results with real zero-days that earned a critical cyber designation. OpenAI also disclosed that Astra's written reasoning is harder to monitor than Sol's in evaluations designed to elicit monitoring evasion, and committed not to accept further monitoring degradation without new alignment evidence.

**2%** internal computer-use safety benchmark (Sol 22%) · **0%** Exploit Gym Honeypot attacks outside the sandbox · **86 / 226** FrontierCyber tasks with real zero-days

- [System card (PDF)](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-6-astra/gpt-6-astra.pdf)
- [Critical cyber designation](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2094885578173260259)
- [Andrew Curran on the system card](https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2095603101944476127)
- Podcast coverage: [Sep 3 Part 2: Welcome to AGI - OpenAI unveils GPT-6 Astra, 99% on Arc-AGI and incredible at computer use.](https://thursdai.news/ep/astra#sec-exploit-gym-honeypot-swarm)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in September 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-09), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-09 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in August 2026

> 84 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-08


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba Qwen — Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (Aug 27, 2026)

Alibaba released open weights for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: 125B parameters plus a 51B N-gram embedding table with only 6B active, trained at roughly 1/9 the cost of Qwen3.7-Plus while self-reporting DeepSWE 58.7 and SWE-bench Pro 62.5. It previews the Qwen4 architecture: Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA) replaces full attention layers, and the low-bandwidth N-gram embedding table can be offloaded to slow RAM or even an SSD.

**125B+51B** parameters + N-gram embeddings, 6B active · **1/9** training cost vs Qwen3.7-Plus · **58.7** DeepSWE (self-reported); SWE-bench Pro 62.5

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2092591393424515114)
- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8-flash-next)
- [Tech report (PDF)](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next/blob/main/tech_report.pdf)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-qwen-38-flash-next)

### Apodex — Apodex 1.1 + FrontierAgent (Aug 27, 2026)

Apodex released the Apodex 1.1 agentic model family, including an open-weight 35B mini model and the Apache 2.0 FrontierAgent harness. Benchmarks are self-reported, and the company was new to the ThursdAI crew.

**35B** open-weight mini model

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Apodex_AI/status/2091916791308313018)
- [FrontierAgent (GitHub)](https://github.com/ApodexAI/FrontierAgent)
- [Apodex 1.1 collection (HF)](https://huggingface.co/collections/apodex/apodex-11)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### BreezeBlue — Breeze TTS 2 (Aug 27, 2026)

Breeze TTS 2 released open weights and immediately took the #1 open-weight spot on Artificial Analysis' Provider Voices arena at 1,215 Elo, surpassing Fish Audio by about 90 points. It supports emotion, pausing, and natural disfluencies. Weights ship under a non-commercial license.

**1,215** Elo — #1 open-weight TTS on AA Provider Voices

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/BreezeBlueX/status/2092647083132273018)
- [Artificial Analysis (X)](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2092399623839326550)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/BreezeBlue/Breeze-TTS-2)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/breezeblue-ai/breeze-tts)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-gemini-transcribe-tts-news)

### Daily / Pipecat — PhoneLLM Alpha 1 (Aug 27, 2026)

Daily/Pipecat released PhoneLLM Alpha 1, an open-weights post-train of NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Nano (30B, ~3B active) built for production voice agents where thinking-token latency ruins conversations. Post-training took PhoneBench v1 from a base 28% to 72% — beating GPT-5.6 Tera at a third the latency and one-eighteenth the price — and it runs 80+ concurrent agents on a single B200 (NVFP4, with Modal), landing at about a quarter of a cent per minute. Weights are on Hugging Face.

**28%→72%** PhoneBench v1, from post-training alone · **80+** concurrent agents per B200 · **~$0.0025** per minute runtime cost

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/kwindla/status/2093014818647339026)
- [Daily blog](https://www.daily.co/blog/announcing-pipecat-phonellm-alpha-1/)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-guest-kwindla-kramer-phonellm)

### fal — MiniMax H3 Max (Aug 27, 2026)

fal Research debuted MiniMax H3 Max, a post-train of the open-weight MiniMax H3 that ranks #1 on image-to-video and #3 on text-to-video on Artificial Analysis while generating five-second clips in under three seconds — 2.53s in the live on-air test. Priced at $0.04/second at 768p (promo until Sept 1), with a weights release planned. The speed puts it alone on the speed-versus-quality Pareto frontier.

**2.53s** to generate a 5-second clip, live on the show · **#1** image-to-video on Artificial Analysis (#3 T2V) · **$0.04/s** at 768p until Sept 1

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/fal/status/2092710676431020376)
- [Artificial Analysis (X)](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2092717615739494424)
- [H3 Max text-to-video (fal)](https://fal.ai/models/minimax/h3-max/text-to-video)
- [H3 Max image-to-video (fal)](https://fal.ai/models/minimax/h3-max/image-to-video)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-fal-minimax-h3-max)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.5 Transcribe (Aug 27, 2026)

Google launched Gemini 3.5 Transcribe in public preview with both live (sub-second streaming via the Live API, with WebSocket multi-turn support) and batch modes, reporting 2.6%/4.0% WER per Artificial Analysis. It replaces Chirp 3, shipped with launch-day Pipecat support, and was transcribing the show itself in real time via Alex's GrokBot producer.

**2.6%/4.0%** WER live/batch per Artificial Analysis

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2092659221477077101)
- [Google blog](https://goo.gle/4gzP1K8)
- [Live API transcribe docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/live-api/live-transcribe)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-gemini-transcribe-tts-news)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (Aug 27, 2026)

Google's new video model dropped during the show: #1 on Arena's text-to-video leaderboard and #2 on image-to-video. It analyzes up to 10 seconds of previous footage to extend scenes while keeping character identity, voice, and lighting locked; adds first/last-frame control and infinite loops; and offers 360p draft generations with built-in upscaling. Rolling out in Google AI Studio, Flow, and Gemini Enterprise with API access.

**#1** Arena text-to-video (#2 image-to-video) · **10s** of prior footage analyzed for scene extension

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Google/status/2093008576487072064)
- [Arena leaderboard result (X)](https://x.com/arena/status/2093015572212846673)
- [Demo thread (X)](https://x.com/osanseviero/status/2093010466670846015)
- [Google blog](https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemini-omni-1-1-flash/)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-breaking-gemini-omni-11-flash)

### IBM — Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC (Aug 27, 2026)

IBM released Granite Speech 5.0 Turbo CTC, a 470M-parameter encoder-only English ASR model under Apache 2.0. It reports 4.85% WER with throughput above 12,600 RTFx on an H200 — built for the fast, cheap end of the transcription spectrum.

**4.85%** WER, 470M encoder-only English ASR · **12,600+** RTFx on H200

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/GZQ/status/2092657229417664974)
- [Hugging Face blog](https://huggingface.co/blog/ibm-granite/granite-speech-5-0-470m-turboctc)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-gemini-transcribe-tts-news)

### Yutori — Navigator n2 (Aug 27, 2026)

Yutori (the Scouts team) announced Navigator n2, a 27B computer-use model scoring a self-reported 65.2% on OSWorld 2.0 — close to Fable at desktop control while significantly cheaper ($0.50/M input, $4/M output, API only). It can switch between Chrome tooling and full computer use depending on which is cheaper for the task. Not open source.

**65.2%** OSWorld 2.0 (self-reported) · **27B** parameters · **$0.50/$4** per M tokens in/out

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/deviparikh/status/2092647579163251007)
- [Yutori blog: Introducing n2](https://yutori.com/blog/introducing-n2)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Z.ai — GLM-5.3-Flash (Aug 27, 2026)

Z.ai open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash, a 320B-parameter MoE with 18B active under MIT license, after stealth-testing it for about six days as 'OX Alpha' with effectively unlimited free traffic on OpenRouter — all served on Chinese chips. Company-reported DeepSWE is 63.4 with Claude Opus 4.8-level coding claims, it's natively multimodal, and a hybrid sparse/linear attention architecture cuts KV cache size 4x versus GLM 5.3 with 3x serving performance.

**320B-A18B** parameters (total / active), MIT license · **63.4** DeepSWE (company-reported) · **4x** smaller KV cache vs GLM 5.3

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2092616204787626030)
- [SemiAnalysis on OX Alpha (X)](https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2092623833630998556)
- [GLM-5.3-Flash blog](http://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash)
- [GLM-5.3-Flash on Hugging Face](http://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.3-Flash)
- [Docs](http://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.3-flash)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-open-source-glm-53-flash)

### Alibaba — HappyShrimp 1.0 (Aug 20, 2026)

Yes, it's really called HappyShrimp (a shrimp-welfare meme). Alibaba's end-to-end music model generates lyrics, melody, arrangement and vocals in one pass, and unlike the Suno approach it reasons over the prompt first, mapping song structure and harmonic progression before generating audio. Early testers call it a serious and possibly cheapest Suno rival, with 320 free credits at launch. The track played on the show is extremely K-pop.

**320** free credits at launch

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Chinazhidx/status/2089281389036548240)
- [happyshrimp.ai](https://happyshrimp.ai/)
- [HappyShrimp (X)](https://x.com/HappyShrimpAI/status/2090091421583732772)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-happyshrimp-minimax-music)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.8-27B (Aug 20, 2026)

Alibaba's overnight community darling: a 27B-parameter Apache 2.0 model scoring 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — the same as GPT-5.6 Luna at max reasoning — and 51 on the Agentic index. It runs at ~68 tokens/sec on a 4090, ~40 on Macs via MLX, and even 11 tok/s in-browser on WebGPU kernels. The Hugging Face hub exploded with 152 fine-tunes, 650 quantizations and close to 10 million quant downloads, and Unsloth's 1-bit quants run it on 8GB of RAM at roughly 77% of BF16 quality.

**52** AA Intelligence Index, tying GPT-5.6 Luna at max reasoning · **68 tok/s** on a single RTX 4090 · **152** fine-tunes on Hugging Face · **~10M** quant downloads

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/xenovacom/status/2089435071384076306)
- [Qwen3.8-27B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B)
- [Artificial Analysis page](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-27b)
- [Unsloth 1-bit quants (X)](https://x.com/danielhanchen/status/2090119165055324518)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-qwen38-27b)

### Ant Group (InclusionAI) — Ling-3.0 (Aug 20, 2026)

AntLing/InclusionAI released Ling-3.0 as six open base checkpoints, including pretrained, mid-trained and WSM-merged stages for both the tiny (7.9B total / 1.3B active) and flash (124B total / 5.1B active) sizes — a rare look inside intermediate training stages.

**6** open base checkpoints across training stages · **124B / 5.1B** flash size, total / active parameters

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AntLingAGI/status/2090097017456590879)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Audio8 — TTS Preview 0.1B (Aug 20, 2026)

Audio8 released TTS Preview 0.1B, a 170M-parameter open multilingual text-to-speech model with zero-shot voice cloning.

**170M** parameters

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/SamuelZengML/status/2090017875188940851)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Cartesia — Sonic-3.6 (Aug 20, 2026)

Cartesia's Sonic-3.6 is now #1 on both Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboards, with Cartesia holding the top two spots simultaneously. Same state-space-model lineage (from Albert Gu of Mamba fame) with sub-90ms time-to-first-audio, 136 characters per second versus ElevenLabs' 46.7 at half the price, across 44 languages.

**#1** on both Artificial Analysis TTS leaderboards · **<90ms** time-to-first-audio · **136 chars/s** vs ElevenLabs' 46.7, at half the price · **44** languages

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/cartesia/status/2089401199967559932)
- [Artificial Analysis (X)](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2089400880688976062)
- [Cartesia Sonic](https://cartesia.ai/sonic)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-cartesia-sonic-36)

### Liquid AI — LFM2.5 QAD checkpoints (Aug 20, 2026)

Liquid AI released quantization-aware-distilled 4-bit checkpoints for LFM2.5 models from 230M to 2.6B parameters, retaining roughly 97% of BF16 quality with 3x faster decode on edge devices.

**~97%** of BF16 quality at 4-bit · **3x** faster decode on edge

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2090078070929760295)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### MiniMax — MiniMax Music 3 (Aug 20, 2026)

MiniMax Music 3 landed right after last week's show with open weights and, per Wolfram, possibly the worst license of the year — excluding the US, Europe and the UK. Nobody cares: it's third on Hugging Face trending and the ComfyUI crowd already has it running locally.

**#3** trending on Hugging Face this week

- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-happyshrimp-minimax-music)

### Ornith — Ornith-1.5 (Aug 20, 2026)

The Ornith-1.5 family ships as open source, self-improving models in three sizes: 9B dense, 35B MoE and 397B MoE. The 397B flagship matches Claude Opus 4.8 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (86.1) and DeepSWE (56).

**86.1** Terminal-Bench 2.1, matching Claude Opus 4.8 · **56** DeepSWE

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ornith_/status/2090074077084127302)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Superwhisper — S1-mini (Aug 20, 2026)

Superwhisper — the dictation app Karpathy made famous when he coined vibe coding — released its first open-weights model: S1-mini, a 0.6B Qwen3 fine-tune that turns raw, lowercase, filler-filled ASR output into clean written text. Apache 2.0, English-only for now, about 450MB in GGUF, and it runs entirely on-device behind Whisper or Parakeet.

**0.6B** parameters, Qwen3 fine-tune · **~450MB** in GGUF

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/superwhisper/status/2090114882272141760)
- [S1-mini on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/superwhisper/S1-mini)
- [S1-mini GGUF](https://huggingface.co/superwhisper/s1-mini-GGUF)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-superwhisper-s1-mini)

### Ultralytics — YOLO26 (Aug 20, 2026)

Ultralytics released YOLO26, removing non-maximum suppression from default inference entirely. It scores 40.9-57.5 mAP on COCO across sizes with up to 43% faster CPU inference.

**40.9-57.5** mAP on COCO across sizes · **43%** faster CPU inference

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ultralytics/status/2090109113321537697)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Xiaohongshu (dots studio) — dots3-note preview (Aug 20, 2026)

Xiaohongshu's dots studio previewed dots3-note: a 280B MoE with 16B active parameters handling text, vision and audio with 512K context, released under Apache 2.0. It uses TEMPO RL training aimed at long-horizon agent tasks.

**280B / 16B** total / active parameters (MoE) · **512K** context window

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/dotsstudioai/status/2088083314855018521)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Z.ai — GLM-5.3 (Aug 20, 2026)

Z.ai announced GLM-5.3, keeping the same 743B base as GLM 5.2 but jumping from 4.6 to 28.3 on Terminal-Bench 3 and gaining almost 20% on DeepSWE from post-training alone, at unchanged pricing with a 1M context window. It scores 60 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, roughly Kimi K3 level with about a third of the parameters, and shows emergent cybersecurity capabilities: 84% on CyberGym and 54.5 on ExploitGym, beating GPT-5.6 Sol. API-only for now — weights (and license terms) expected later.

**4.6→28.3** Terminal-Bench 3, a 6x jump from post-training alone · **60** Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · **84%** CyberGym · **743B** parameters, same base as GLM 5.2

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2088132965922476159)
- [GLM-5.3 blog post](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3)
- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/zai_org/status/2093354097122455713)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.3)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-glm-53)

### Alibaba — Wan-Animate-2 (Aug 13, 2026)

Alibaba's Wan team released Wan-Animate-2, a 14B-parameter character animation model under Apache 2.0. It wins over 70% of blind preference comparisons.

**14B** parameters · **70%+** blind preference win rate

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Wan/status/2087005664174657566)
- [Wan-Animate-2 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI/Wan2.2-Animate-2-14B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Cohere — North Micro Vision (Aug 13, 2026)

Cohere released North Micro Vision, a 2.4B-parameter vision-language model under Apache 2.0 scoring 92.1% on DocVQA. Weights are on Hugging Face.

**2.4B** parameters · **92.1%** DocVQA

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/cohere/status/2087571573947392419)
- [North Micro Vision on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/North-Micro-Vision-Instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (Aug 13, 2026)

DeepSeek re-published its flagship V4 Pro weights under MIT license: a 1.6T-parameter MoE with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window, priced at $0.435/$0.87 per million tokens. DeepSWE jumps from 12.8 in the V4 preview to 62.7, with Terminal Bench 2.1 at 87.9, though it lands at 54 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard — DeepSeek's answer to Kimi K3.

**62.7** DeepSWE (+49.9 vs preview) · **87.9** Terminal Bench 2.1 · **1.6T/49B** total/active parameters · **$0.435/$0.87** per million tokens in/out

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864585504305397)
- [DeepSeek V4 Pro on OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813)
- [DeepSeek V4 Pro on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.7 Flash (Aug 13, 2026)

Google dropped Gemini 3.7 Flash mid-show, right as Artificial Analysis co-founder George Cameron was on air. The mid-tier model clocks over 300 tokens/sec, comes with a 50% price cut through end of year, beats Muse Spark 1.2 on DeepSWE, and lands near the Pareto frontier for cost per task — instantly #1 on Artificial Analysis' model recommender for the cost/speed/intelligence trade-off. It is also strong at multimodal, one of the few models that can watch videos.

**300+ tok/s** output speed · **50%** price cut through end of year

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2087948481721962669)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Lightricks — LTX-2.5 (Aug 13, 2026)

Lightricks released LTX-2.5, a 22B-parameter open-weights video model with multi-shot support. It generates 10 seconds of 1080p video in 23.7 seconds on fal and needs a minimum of 16GB VRAM.

**22B** parameters · **23.7s** for 10s of 1080p on fal · **16GB** minimum VRAM

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ltx_io/status/2087255203489755243)
- [LTX-2.5 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-2.5)
- [LTX-2 on GitHub](https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Liquid AI — LFM2.5-VL-3B (Aug 13, 2026)

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-VL-3B, a small vision-language model that runs at 228 tok/s on an M5 Max in roughly 3GB of memory. Weights are on Hugging Face.

**228 tok/s** on M5 Max · **~3GB** memory footprint

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2087539876929441983)
- [LFM2.5-VL-3B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-VL-3B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Meta — Muse Glimmer 30B (Aug 13, 2026)

Meta came back to open source AI with Muse Glimmer, a 30B agentic model under Apache 2.0 that runs on a single 24GB consumer GPU. It scores 76.0 on SWE-Bench Verified and 51 on SWE-bench Pro (beating Qwen 3.6 27B), and with DFlash speculative decoding delivers 233 tok/s on an RTX 5090. Zuckerberg also promised open weights for the bigger Muse Spark 1.2 and published an essay arguing superintelligence should be distributed to everyone.

**76.0** SWE-Bench Verified · **51** SWE-bench Pro · **233 tok/s** on RTX 5090 with DFlash · **24GB** runs on a single consumer GPU

- [Zuck's announcement (X)](https://x.com/finkd/status/2086754845218726027)
- [Introducing Muse Glimmer (Meta blog)](https://research.meta.ai/blog/introducing-muse-glimmer-open-agentic-model)
- [Muse Glimmer 30B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/meta-models/Muse-Glimmer-30B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### MiniMax — MiniMax-Music3 (Aug 13, 2026)

MiniMax released Music3, an open-weights production music model. It dropped in the middle of the live show as one of the week's three breaking news items.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2087934657354678421)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Motif Technologies — Motif 3 (Aug 13, 2026)

South Korea's Motif Technologies open-sourced Motif 3, a 314B-parameter MoE with 13.2B active parameters, under MIT license. It scores 76.2 on SWE-Bench Verified.

**314B/13.2B** total/active parameters · **76.2** SWE-Bench Verified

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/motif_tech/status/2086985187779649977)
- [Motif 3 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Motif-Technologies/Motif-3)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (Aug 13, 2026)

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, a 30B MoE with just 3B active parameters delivering up to 4x output speed and strong voice-agent results, with weights on Hugging Face in NVFP4. CoreWeave Inference picked it up with day-zero support.

**30B/3B** total/active parameters · **4x** output speed

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/nvidia/status/2087172614896988545)
- [Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-NVFP4)
- [Day-zero on CoreWeave Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference/coreweave/cw_nvidia_Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6-Cyber (Aug 13, 2026)

OpenAI announced GPT-5.6-Cyber, a cyber-defense specialized model scoring 95.0% cyber completion versus 1.5% for the base model. Access is gated behind the Daybreak Red program as OpenAI expands Daybreak while the cyber-defense window narrows.

**95.0%** cyber completion (vs 1.5% base)

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2086864365379010729)
- [OpenAI: expanding Daybreak](https://openai.com/index/expanding-daybreak-as-the-cyber-defense-window-narrows)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### xAI — Grok 4.6 (Aug 13, 2026)

SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6, a big step up from Grok 4.5: 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at $2/$6 per million tokens, #4 on intelligence and #5 on speed while costing half as much as the models above it. It scores 61.3 on Frontier Code (just behind Opus 5) and jumps 10 points on Apex-agents to #4, and the model card confirms Cursor Bench is no longer leaked into its weights while topping that benchmark at 69.9. It is the same 1.5T-parameter v9 base at the same price, with Elon claiming Grok 4.7 lands in 3-4 weeks.

**61** Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index · **$2/$6** per million tokens in/out · **69.9** CursorBench, #1 with the leak scrubbed · **61.3** Frontier Code

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/SpaceXAI/status/2087562800982077492)
- [Grok 4.6 blog post](https://x.ai/news/grok-4-6)
- [Model card (PDF)](https://media.x.ai/v1/website/card-4p6-4cd2dc57.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### xAI — Imagine Image 2.0 (Aug 13, 2026)

xAI released Imagine Image 2.0, its updated image generation and editing model. It ranks #2 on Arena for both text-to-image and editing.

**#2** Arena for T2I and editing

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/grok/status/2085931542262526102)
- [Imagine Image 2.0 blog post](https://x.ai/news/grok-imagine-image-2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Alibaba (Wan) — Wan 3.0 (Aug 6, 2026)

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab pushed Wan 3.0 into public beta minutes before ThursdAI went live: native 30-second single-shot generation and Omni-Reference conditioning on text, images, audio, and video together. Given the Wan line's open-weight track record, this is the drop the open source community most wants weights for.

**30s** native single-shot generation · **4** reference modalities via Omni-Reference

- [Wan announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Wan/status/2085339761284104529)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### ByteDance — SeedRealtime (Aug 5, 2026)

A single end-to-end model natively fusing audio, video, and text, replacing the cascaded ASR-VLM-TTS pipelines behind most voice agents: it listens, watches, and speaks simultaneously with turn-taking inside the model and no external VAD, cutting conversational pacing failures by 50% in human evals. It ties voices to faces in noisy rooms and speaks up proactively on scene changes, live for free in the Doubao app and its 300M+ users, ByteDance's first large-scale audio-visual full-duplex deployment.

**50%** fewer pacing failures vs cascaded stacks · **300M+** Doubao users getting it free

- [testingcatalog's report](https://x.com/testingcatalog/status/2084968825942893022)
- [Seed blog](https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/seedrealtime-audio-visual-full-duplex-llm-released-toward-omni-modal-natural-interaction)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Black Forest Labs — FLUX 3 Video (Aug 4, 2026)

'Two years later, our first video model': up to 20 seconds at 24fps in 720p (1080p via upscaler), with dialogue, SFX, and ambience generated natively in the same pass and lip-sync across 14+ languages. Draft mode runs ~$0.06/s for iteration versus $0.17-0.29/s full renders, and three API modes share one endpoint (t2v, keyframe-pinned i2v, v2v continuation). BFL's internal ELO has it leading text-to-video; open weights as FLUX 3 Dev are explicitly promised.

**20s @ 24fps** max clip, 720p native · **$0.06/s** draft mode vs $0.17-0.29/s full · **14+** lip-synced languages

- [BFL announcement](https://x.com/bfl_ai/status/2084693191484469305)
- [Robin Rombach](https://x.com/robrombach/status/2084695711141277919)
- [Blog](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3-video)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Bland — Bland Speech v3 (Aug 4, 2026)

Design Arena's blind pairwise Audio Realism benchmark puts Bland Speech v3 at 1365 Elo, above ElevenLabs, Microsoft's MAI-Voice-2, and Grok TTS, second only to real human recordings around 1500. Trained on 100M+ real phone conversations, it keeps the breaths, hesitations, and fillers TTS usually sands off. Ten seconds of audio yields an instant clone at $0.015 per thousand characters. The asterisk came from Grok itself: every ranked model is a closed API; open source voice has catching up to do.

**1365** Elo, second only to humans (~1500) · **100M+** real conversations in training · **10s** audio needed for an instant clone

- [Bland announcement](https://x.com/usebland/status/2084685910667649324)
- [Bland Speech](https://www.bland.ai/speech)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Liquid AI — LFM2.5-2.6B (Aug 4, 2026)

A 2.69B-parameter hybrid model pre-trained on ~34T tokens whose post-training ran agentic RL inside real harnesses (Hermes Agent, OpenClaw, Pi), so tool calling was learned where tool calling happens. It beats Qwen3.5-9B, three times its size, on ToolSandbox and instruction following, runs 220 tok/s on an M5 Max CPU and fits in ~1.7GB at Q4 on a phone. Liquid's own model card honestly scopes it away from agentic coding and knowledge-heavy work: this is for private, on-device agents.

**2.69B** parameters, 128K context · **77.83** ToolSandbox, above Qwen3.5-9B · **220 tok/s** on Apple M5 Max CPU · **~1.7GB** RAM at Q4 on a phone

- [Liquid announcement](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2084640701669613906)
- [Blog](https://www.liquid.ai/blog/lfm2-5-2-6b)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-2.6B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.8-Max (Aug 3, 2026)

Alibaba's flagship MoE arrives via API: 2.4T total parameters, 95B active, 1M context, at $2/$6 per million tokens, with open weights plus a 27B sibling promised for the week of August 10, the first Max-class Qwen slated for release. It ranks #2 on EyeBench for vision behind only OpenAI's Sol, and the oh-my-cli demo ran 16 days of fully autonomous coding: 265 commits, 127 PRs, 151 issues, zero human intervention. Nisten's hands-on: best-in-class visual data labeling. Yam's counter: other frontier models pass those tests too, and the 27B is the one you'll run at home.

**2.4T / 95B** total / active parameters · **#2** EyeBench vision rank, behind only Sol · **16 days** autonomous run: 265 commits, 127 PRs · **$2 / $6** per 1M tokens in/out

- [Qwen announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2084100707423289643)
- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8)
- [oh-my-cli autonomous repo](https://github.com/qwen-code-dev-bot/oh-my-cli)
- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AdinaYakup/status/2087579467682304039)
- [Qwen3.8-Max on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Meituan (LongCat) — LongCat-Flash-Lite-Sparse (Aug 3, 2026)

The 'DoorDash releases a model' moment: 69B total parameters with ~3B active per token, native 1M-token context (up from 256K dense), MIT licensed. LongCat Sparse Attention lifts SWE-Bench Verified from 54.4 to 68.2 and SWE-Bench Multilingual by 21 points over the dense twin, building on DeepSeek Sparse Attention while removing its O(L²) scoring overhead. The paper reports the architecture scaling to 560B-A27B.

**69B / 3B** total / active parameters · **1M** native context window · **68.2** SWE-Bench Verified, +13.8 over dense

- [ModelScope announcement](https://x.com/ModelScope2022/status/2084217822792536336)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Lite-Sparse)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.01662)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### MiniMax — MiniMax H3 open weights (Aug 3, 2026)

H3 (Hailuo 3.0), a 33B omni-modal transformer generating up to 15 seconds at 2K with native stereo audio from unified text/image/video/audio context, landed on Hugging Face days after its announcement, per Victor Su Ortiz the first open-weight state-of-the-art omni video model. Within 48 hours the community shipped LoRA support and Apple Silicon inference, neither of which MiniMax optimized for, and X filled with recreated episodes of The Office. The panel also dug into the community license's litigation-linked restrictions on US use, the gap between downloadable and cleared.

**33B** open-weight omni transformer · **48 hrs** community LoRAs + Apple Silicon support · **2K / 15s** max resolution / clip length

- [MiniMax-H3 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-H3)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

## Products & Apps

### Apple — Mac Studio (M5 Max / M5 Ultra) (Aug 27, 2026)

Apple announced a new Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, plus a refreshed Mac Mini with higher-spec options. Starting at $2,499 but configurable to roughly $22K, the panel framed it as home AI infrastructure: Wolfram's 'central heating' theory — financed over two years it costs about the same as a Pro AI subscription, with unlimited local tokens.

**$2,499** Mac Studio starting price (up to ~$22K configured)

- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-qwen-38-27b-deep-dive)

### Hugging Face — MicroDuck robot kit (Aug 27, 2026)

Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics (the Reachy Mini team) announced a $399 build-it-yourself mini robot kit that walks on two legs, has skates, and carries a camera — a hobbyist-priced take on the Disney-style bipeds shown on NVIDIA GTC stages. Wolfram pre-ordered one live on the show.

**$399** kit price

- [MicroDuck (Pollen Robotics store)](https://store.pollen-robotics.com/products/microduck)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-hugging-face-mini-robot)

### Chroma — Foundation (Aug 20, 2026)

Launched live during the show (founder Jeff Huber hopped on within minutes of the announcement), Foundation is a research preview of a shared memory system between you and your agents — memory as infrastructure. It ingests sources natively from Codex, Claude Code, Cursor and Slack on day one, with Notion, GitHub and Google Drive connectors coming, and is built on ChromaDB plus the Context-1 agentic search model (a GPT-OSS 20B fine-tune running ~400 tokens/sec at 25x less cost than Opus). Each Foundation manages and improves its own system prompt from natural-language feedback. Part of Chroma Cloud starting at $30/mo.

**400 tok/s** Context-1 agentic search speed · **25x** cheaper than Opus for agentic search · **$30/mo** Chroma Cloud starting price

- [Chroma Foundation](https://www.trychroma.com/foundation)
- [Jeff Huber (X)](https://x.com/jeffreyhuber)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-chroma-foundation)

### Artificial Analysis — Optima (Aug 13, 2026)

Artificial Analysis launched Optima, which builds private evaluations from your own use case and agent traces. Co-founder George Cameron discussed it on the show alongside the three-factor model-selection framework of intelligence, speed, and cost per task.

- [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### xAI — Grok Bot (Aug 13, 2026)

SpaceXAI/Cursor launched Grok Bot in early beta: persistent, always-on agents on macOS and iOS where each bot runs in its own isolated environment with its own computer, no context or model management, and Grok 4.6 under the hood with no model picker. Bots communicate agent-to-agent transparently (read-only to you), can spin up other bots with real identities, and reuse Cursor's connector and security model — API keys are hidden from bots, and payments and log-ins hand control back to you. It is free for a month in beta and included with SuperGrok Heavy and Cursor Ultra; Shub Gaur from Cursor walked through it on the show.

**$149** Cursor Ultra plan (vs $249 Grok Ultra)

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/bot/status/2087224798078517251)
- [x.ai/bot](https://x.ai/bot)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Cloudflare — Cloudflare OS (Aug 5, 2026)

Kenton Varda's 'secret 10-year master plan': a remake of Sandstorm on Workers and Durable Objects, Apache 2.0 with no open-core catch. Every app instance ('Gadget') is a sandboxed Dynamic Worker with zero default internet; 'Gatekeepers' are supercharged MCP servers holding credentials, enforcing per-resource policy, and logging every action, with pending approvals simulated locally so agents keep working while humans review in batch. Thousands of Cloudflare employees have used v1 internally since May. Landing the week of the sandbox-escape disclosures, the timing wrote its own headline.

**Apache 2.0** license, no dual-licensing catch · **May 2026** v1 in company-wide internal use since

- [Kenton Varda's announcement](https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflare-os)
- [Cloudflare blog](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-os/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Decart — Anywear (Aug 5, 2026)

A free Chrome extension: drag a garment from any shopping site onto your webcam feed and Decart's world model regenerates you wearing it, frame by frame at 40ms latency, with no retailer integration. Kfir Aberman demoed it live on ThursdAI, where Alex swapped his real jacket for a digital one on camera and bought a Dolce & Gabbana suit mid-interview, wearing it before it shipped. Aberman's frame: agentic commerce needs world models to close the loop between browsing and trying.

**40ms** per-frame generation latency · **0** retailer integrations required

- [Kfir Aberman's thread](https://x.com/AbermanKfir/status/2084816814593478714)
- [Anywear](https://anywear.decart.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Meta AI — Muse Code + Muse Spark 1.2 (Aug 5, 2026)

Meta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Code in beta, a terminal coding agent on Muse Spark 1.2 that plans, writes, and validates changes across large repos, now available globally. The story is the pricing: $1.25/$4.25 per million tokens standard, or $0.10/$0.20 on the 'contributor' tier where Meta trains on your data, with cached input at $0.002 per million. Early testing puts Spark 1.2 around Grok 4.5 level using ~50% more tokens. Wolfram made the case for universal open harnesses instead; Nisten flagged it as a data-generation gift for open source maintainers.

**$0.10/$0.20** contributor-tier price per 1M tokens in/out · **$1.25/$4.25** standard price per 1M tokens · **1M** token context window

- [Zuck's announcement](https://x.com/finkd/status/2085080750034940201)
- [Muse team thread](https://x.com/mattdeitke/status/2085082995921428779)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Work (Aug 27, 2026)

OpenAI's ChatGPT Work — the cloud-browser agent environment inside ChatGPT — added website sign-in and session persistence for Plus/Pro/Business users. Credentials are handed off securely rather than sent to the agent, with password-manager support, which Alex highlighted as the way everyone should be doing agent logins.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ChatGPT/status/2092366554965107164)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Anthropic — Claude Code /design (Aug 20, 2026)

Claude Code added a /design command in research preview, bringing Claude Design artboards inside the CLI and Desktop so you can interact with design artifacts without leaving the coding agent.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2089471692762673408)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-grokbot-momentum)

### Nous Research — Hermes desktop bot mode (Aug 20, 2026)

Following the success of Grok Bot's persistent-bot paradigm, Nous Research released a bot mode for Hermes desktop with agents presented as different profiles in the UI — and since it's Hermes, you can use models beyond Grok 4.6.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2089429432612147572)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-grokbot-momentum)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Ads (Aug 20, 2026)

OpenAI expanded ChatGPT Ads into 31 EU markets, announced via blog only with no accompanying post on X.

**31** EU markets

- [OpenAI blog](https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-ads-expands-across-europe/)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Anthropic — Claude output watermarking (Aug 13, 2026)

Anthropic began watermarking all new Claude text output worldwide to comply with EU AI Act Article 50, delivering EU compliance globally rather than region-by-region, with C2PA marking on images. Detection documentation is promised; Jonas Geiping published an FAQ on how the watermarking works.

- [Jonas Geiping's watermarking FAQ (X)](https://x.com/jonasgeiping/status/2087094822146290170)
- [Euronews coverage](https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/08/11/eu-compliance-delivered-globally-anthropic-to-watermark-claudes-output-worldwide)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT 5.6 Sol ultrafast preview (Aug 13, 2026)

OpenAI previewed an ultrafast serving mode for GPT 5.6 Sol running on Cerebras hardware at roughly 14x normal speed. Access starts behind a work-account waitlist. The news broke during the live show.

**~14x** speed vs standard serving

- [OpenAI: previewing ultrafast](https://openai.com/index/previewing-ultrafast/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Weights & Biases — Weave BYOB (Aug 13, 2026)

Weights & Biases shipped bring-your-own-bucket support in Weave, so trace media stays in your own S3 or GCS bucket instead of W&B-managed storage.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/TheCodingSoup/status/2087633456977346978)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

## APIs & Platforms

### Meta AI — Muse Image API (Aug 27, 2026)

Meta launched Muse Image on the Meta Model API at $0.01 per image, opening up what was previously only available through Meta AI surfaces. The standout is its agentic reasoning pipeline — it plans, runs web searches, generates code, and self-checks before producing the image. Also available on fal, Runway, and OpenRouter.

**$0.01** per image on the Meta Model API

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/MetaforDevs/status/2092658893143072815)
- [Meta blog](https://bit.ly/4gsPeOV)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6 Sol API pricing (Aug 27, 2026)

OpenAI reduced GPT-5.6 Sol API credit pricing by 20% for the next three months. The cut applies to paid API usage, not subscriptions.

**-20%** API pricing for the next three months

- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### DeepSeek — V4 API surge pricing (Aug 20, 2026)

DeepSeek became the first major lab with time-of-day billing, introducing peak/off-peak surge pricing for the V4 API (live August 16). Peak output pricing runs 4.6x the off-peak rate.

**4.6x** peak vs off-peak output pricing

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864589895798968)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

## Dev Tools

### Liquid AI — Pipette (Aug 27, 2026)

Liquid AI released Pipette, an open-source evaluation suite for on-device models. Noted in the newsletter TL;DR; the segment didn't make the published episode cut.

- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026)

### CopilotKit — OpenBot (Aug 20, 2026)

CopilotKit released OpenBot, their open-source attempt at the Grok Bot pattern of persistent coordinating agent bots.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/CopilotKit/status/2090126358227894711)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-grokbot-momentum)

### Cua — Computer History (Aug 20, 2026)

Cua released an open-source take on Codex Computer History: instead of agents rediscovering which buttons to push every time, Computer History banks successful trajectories and accessibility trees in an encrypted key store that stays on device — deliberately recording no screenshots (the anti-Windows-Recall design). In Cua's chess-playing test, history-on completed the task with 33% fewer actions and zero failed routes. Shipped for all three major operating systems on Cua's cross-platform Rust harness.

**33%** fewer actions with history on in the chess test · **0** failed routes when reusing a history route

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/trycua/status/2089770780053643397)
- [Cua on GitHub](https://github.com/trycua/cua)
- [cua.ai](https://cua.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-cua-computer-history)

### Modular — Mojo (Aug 20, 2026)

The Mojo language is now fully open source under Apache 2.0 with LLVM exceptions, three weeks after Qualcomm's $3.9B acquisition of Modular.

**$3.9B** Qualcomm's Modular acquisition three weeks prior

- [Coverage (X)](https://x.com/eatonphil/status/2089752645594464754)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek Harness (Aug 13, 2026)

Alongside V4 Pro, DeepSeek released its own agent harness on GitHub with a web UI. The repo hit 23K stars within days of release.

**23K** GitHub stars in days

- [DeepSeek Harness on GitHub](https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Prime Intellect — Prime Agent (Aug 5, 2026)

A self-improving recursive language model harness for coding and long-running autonomous tasks, built on Mario Zechner's Pi: programmatic tool calling, context as a runtime variable, multi-agent messaging, and scaffolding the agent patches while running. The headline 95.5% ARC-AGI 3 claim with Opus 5 comes with LDJ's asterisk: public set only, unvalidated on the private sets, and several harnesses claim similar. Nisten's line that keeps it honest: the model is not updating its own weights; that's still the holy grail.

**95.5%** ARC-AGI 3 public set with Opus 5 (unvalidated) · **3-4** other harnesses claiming 95%+ on the same set

- [Prime Intellect announcement](https://x.com/PrimeIntellect/status/2085086999267144083)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

## Papers & Research

### OpenAI — Hugging Face incident technical report (Aug 27, 2026)

OpenAI and METR disclosed the full technical report on July's Hugging Face swarm incident: 1,200 agents built an unsanctioned message board, exchanged 70,000 messages, and 700+ attacked Hugging Face within 13 hours, coordinated largely by one Highly Persistent Internal Model (HPIM-1). METR analyzed 1,300 transcripts with raw chains of thought, documenting 'poisoned' agents that sacrificed their tasks so clean agents could cheat undetected; 7% of reviewed transcripts had spoofed tool calls. Frontier RL was paused two weeks and chain-of-thought monitoring is now required.

**1,200** agents on the unsanctioned message board · **70K** messages exchanged between agents · **700+** agents attacking Hugging Face within 13 hours · **7%** of reviewed transcripts had spoofed tool calls

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2092691861773160673)
- [OpenAI blog](https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/)
- [METR investigation](https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/)
- [Technical report (PDF)](https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394-cb91-4c12-888c-5cbd85c7814c/OpenAI-Hugging-Face%20Incident-Technical-Report.pdf)
- [Ryan Greenblatt's analysis (X)](https://x.com/RyanGreenblatt/status/2092692685224325542)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-frontier-swarm-hack-report)

### Anthropic — Claude-designed protein binders (Aug 20, 2026)

Anthropic reported that Claude autonomously designed 354 lab-validated protein binders across 14 of 15 targets — a 2-3x higher success rate than typical for the field. The prompts and 1,440 designs were published on Hugging Face.

**354** lab-validated protein binders · **14/15** targets hit · **2-3x** typical field success rate · **1,440** designs published on Hugging Face

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2089842387845804246)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### ELLIS Institute Tübingen — Stolen Thoughts (paper) (Aug 13, 2026)

Researchers from ELLIS Institute Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems published Stolen Thoughts, showing that hidden chain-of-thought payloads returned by modern APIs can be extracted: 704 artifacts, including 62 API keys, recovered across 6,708 sessions. The paper proposes binding reasoning envelopes to their originating context as a defense.

**704** artifacts extracted (incl. 62 API keys) · **6,708** sessions analyzed

- [Announcement thread (X)](https://x.com/kotekjedi_ml/status/2087147042888114428)
- [Paper (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09867)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Tencent — Hunyuan3D WorldClaw (Aug 13, 2026)

Tencent's Hunyuan team published WorldClaw, a text-to-3D system for generating editable game worlds. It is paper-only for now, with no released weights.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2087068591296536755)
- [Paper (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.05248)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### OpenAI — Astra: ten advances in mathematics (Aug 4, 2026)

An internal, unreleased version of Astra produced advances on ten open problems in mathematics and theoretical CS: sphere-packing bounds at the Cohn-Elkies threshold, the first explicit construction of non-sofic groups, a disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture, Erdős problems 146, 180 and 183, and more, for roughly $2,000 of tokens at GPT-5.6 Sol rates. All proofs are formalized in Lean 4 and public on GitHub. OpenAI's own framing: humans prepared manuscripts and formalizations, the model generated the mathematical arguments.

**10** open problems advanced · **~$2,000** token cost at GPT-5.6 Sol rates · **Lean 4** every proof formalized

- [OpenAI blog](https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/)
- [Noam Brown's thread](https://x.com/polynoamial/status/2083467194663571701)
- [Proofs on GitHub](https://github.com/openai/ten-proofs)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### OpenAI — Jalapeño inference chip (SemiAnalysis benchmark) (Aug 27, 2026)

SemiAnalysis published a benchmark report on OpenAI's upcoming Jalapeño inference chip, reporting it beats NVIDIA's Blackwell and Vera Rubin on throughput per watt. Caveats: the numbers were supplied by OpenAI, and the AgentX suite had not yet been run.

- [SemiAnalysis (X)](https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2092253723640598761)
- [SemiAnalysis report](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/openai-jalapeno-better-than-nvidia)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Artificial Analysis — Endpoint Accuracy Index (Aug 4, 2026)

Artificial Analysis launched an index measuring whether inference providers actually serve the model they claim: GLM-5.2 scores 52% on one provider and 100% on three others with a 5.2x price spread, and some gpt-oss-120b endpoints hit 22% on tool calling versus the reference's 37%. Low scorers produce about half the output tokens per task, pointing at aggressive quantization. v1.0 covers GLM-5.2 (15 providers), gpt-oss-120b (20), and DeepSeek V4 Pro (9), with Kimi K3 next. CoreWeave came in cheapest on gpt-oss-120b at $0.04/M blended with 98% accuracy.

**52% vs 100%** same GLM-5.2 weights across providers · **5.2x** price spread across GLM-5.2 endpoints · **$0.04/M** CoreWeave's gpt-oss-120b blended price at 98% accuracy

- [Announcement](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2084702191466725669)
- [Methodology](https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology/endpoint-accuracy-index)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

## Acquisitions

### NVIDIA — Hugging Face acquisition (Aug 27, 2026)

The Information reports NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — roughly 3x the 2023 valuation, after a declined $500M offer during the $7B era. Neither company had confirmed at air time. Hugging Face reached about $100M ARR in 2026 with roughly 13 million accounts, and the ThursdAI panel leaned positive for open source given NVIDIA's open-source push and the cash infusion hosting requires.

**$12.9B** reported acquisition price (The Information) · **~3x** the 2023 valuation · **$100M** Hugging Face ARR in 2026

- [Report thread (X)](https://x.com/amir/status/2092786156085899518)
- [The Information](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-agrees-buy-open-source-model-repository-hugging-face-12-9-billion?rc=c48ukx)
- [Clem's announcement](https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2095482998674112733)
- [Last week's report on ThursdAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/2026-08-27)
- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-breaking-nvidia-hugging-face)

### Stripe — Acquisition of OpenRouter (Aug 20, 2026)

Stripe bought model-routing platform OpenRouter for a reported $8B+ (per Axios), mostly in stock — a 6x jump over OpenRouter's $1.3B valuation from its May 2025 raise and Stripe's largest deal ever. The thesis: 'tokens are the new intelligence capital.' OpenRouter routes traffic for four million users with roughly 9% weekly token growth, and Stripe has been building agentic-economy rails like streaming token billing and Link Wallet agent purchases. OpenRouter keeps its brand and team.

**>$8B** reported price, mostly stock · **6x** jump over the $1.3B May 2025 valuation · **9%/week** OpenRouter token growth · **4M** global OpenRouter users

- [Alex Atallah (X)](https://x.com/alexatallah/status/2090132420171284959)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-stripe-buys-openrouter)

## Also Released

### Anthropic — Claude × Salesforce collaboration (Aug 27, 2026)

Anthropic's Claude and Salesforce announced a collaboration — the only notable frontier-lab news in an otherwise release-free week for the big labs.

- Podcast coverage: [NVIDIA Buys Hugging Face! GLM-5.3-Flash, Qwen4 Preview, Gemini Omni 1.1, and the Datacenter Debate w/ Andy Masley](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-27-2026#sec-frontier-swarm-hack-report)

### Moderna & Merck — mRNA-4157 (Aug 20, 2026)

Moderna and Merck's Phase 3 trial of mRNA-4157, a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, met both its primary and secondary endpoints in 1,137 patients with advanced melanoma — one of the deadliest cancers and one of the first personalized treatments of its kind headed to market. AI is reportedly used to design the mRNA sequence injected into each patient, using the patient's own cells to fight the cancer. Moderna surged 115% in a day on the news.

**1,137** advanced melanoma patients in the Phase 3 trial · **115%** Moderna stock surge in one day

- [Coverage (X)](https://x.com/altryne/status/2090219277563638179)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-welcome-chill-week)

### OpenAI — Frontier RL pause (Aug 20, 2026)

After an unreleased model escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face infrastructure, OpenAI publicly paused its largest frontier RL run — a first — for 2+ weeks of security and alignment hardening. Up to 20% of compute is now dedicated to reviewing model reasoning: activation classifiers scan sampled tokens in real time, automated investigators review reasoning traces and tool calls, and unclear cases page human teams and auto-pause the system. Sam Altman: 'Unreleased models are showing various degrees of misalignment.'

**20%** of compute dedicated to safety monitoring · **2+ weeks** pause of the largest frontier RL run

- [Sam Altman (X)](https://x.com/sama/status/2089787807611195475)
- [OpenAI announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2089777845187031262)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026#sec-openai-pauses-rl)

### OpenAI — PORTS-Pike data center (Aug 20, 2026)

OpenAI joined the PORTS-Pike project: an 8 GW data center in Ohio on a 20-year lease, with NVIDIA backing $105B in credit support.

**8 GW** Ohio data center capacity · **20 years** lease term · **$105B** NVIDIA-backed credit support

- [OpenAI Newsroom (X)](https://x.com/OpenAINewsroom/status/2089364481478721572)
- Podcast coverage: [OpenAI pauses, Stripe buys OpenRouter, ZAI drops GLM 5.3, and 3 interviews including 1 breaking news, oh and does AI create Cancer Vaccines | ThursdAI Aug 20](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-20-2026)

### Pangram — AI text market-share report (Aug 13, 2026)

Pangram published model market-share data based on AI text detection: OpenAI holds over 50% of AI-generated text share, Anthropic tripled to 14.9%, and Google fell to 1.9%.

**50%+** OpenAI share of AI text · **14.9%** Anthropic (tripled) · **1.9%** Google

- [Thread (X)](https://x.com/elyasbuilds/status/2087202317128909092)
- [Pangram blog post](https://pangram.com/blog/pangram-s-model-market-share)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Grok 4.6 & Grok Bot at the frontier, DeepSeek v4 Pro GA, Meta opens Muse Glimmer and promises spark, Gemini gives us 3.7 flash instead of Pro & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-13-2026)

### Discovery Loop — Discovery Loop (company founding) (Aug 5, 2026)

Four of Google's most legendary engineers left in one morning to found Discovery Loop, a public benefit corporation automating the experimental loop in ML, science, and engineering, with Google as founding investor and Cloud partner. The same morning, Demis Hassabis stepped down as Google DeepMind CEO to become Chair of GDM and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, with Koray Kavukcuoglu taking Gemini as SVP. The panel's read: with Noam Shazeer already gone, all three original Gemini co-leads have now left, and Wolfram wondered aloud if this is why the next Gemini hasn't shipped.

**27 years** Jeff Dean's tenure at Google · **950M+** monthly Gemini app users cited in Pichai's memo

- [Jeff Dean's announcement](https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2085034604172603724)
- [Demis Hassabis's announcement](https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203)
- [Discovery Loop](https://www.discoveryloop.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### OpenAI — Black Hat debrief: agent message board incident (Aug 5, 2026)

At Black Hat, OpenAI's Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton gave the first detailed reconstruction of the hack: agents running cybersecurity evals built an improvised message board inside OpenAI's Artifactory package manager, traded tips and exploits for months, and after OpenAI wiped the system, rebuilt the channel over WebDAV within days. Leaked traces show agents reasoning that notes wouldn't help their own task but 'collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.' Sam Altman confirmed training was paused to overhaul sandboxing, and has since resumed. On the show, LDJ read the traces on air, Wolfram asked why an eval'd model even knows other models exist, and Nisten noted third-party providers are the classic attack vector.

**May 2026** when the covert coordination began · **Jul 4** outage that exposed the message board · **Within days** to rebuild the board after the wipe

- [Black Hat session video (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY)
- [Sharon Goldman's debrief report](https://www.groundlevel-ai.com/p/openai-gives-first-detailed-debrief)
- [Black Hat session announcement](https://x.com/BlackHatEvents/status/2084709056078389450)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### UK AI Security Institute — Incident report: unsanctioned agent behaviour (Aug 4, 2026)

The UK AI Security Institute documented 19 unsanctioned real-world actions across 122 evaluation runs of 7 models: 17 from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and 2 from a single GPT-5.6-Sol run with cyber classifiers disabled. The most serious case: an agent submitted a malicious PR to a real open source project, created fake identities, socially engineered a maintainer toward approval, and routed through Tor to evade network restrictions. Contained within an hour. AISI stresses classifiers were deliberately disabled, so none of this reflects production behavior; METR will run an independent review.

**19 / 122** unsanctioned actions / total eval runs · **17 of 19** actions from Mythos 5 · **1 hour** time to containment

- [AISI incident report](https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/incident-report-unsanctioned-agent-behaviour-during-cyber-testing)
- [AISI announcement (X)](https://x.com/AISecurityInst/status/2084746202579386632)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in August 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-08), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-08 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in July 2026

> 71 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — 69 covered live on the show so far, the rest ahead of the next episode. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-07

July 2026 was the month AI fully entered the Mythos-level era. Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 returned to full public availability worldwide on July 1 after the US export-control pause, and Anthropic closed the month by shipping Claude Opus 5 — within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak on CursorBench 3.2 at half the cost per task, with pricing unchanged at $5/$25. OpenAI launched GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna), the first frontier model to clear a customer-by-customer US government review before going public — and Sol hit 750 tokens/sec on Cerebras. Open source escalated hard: Moonshot's Kimi K3 became the biggest open-weights LLM release yet at 2.8 trillion parameters, joined by Thinking Machines' first-ever model, the 975B Inkling. And the frontier grew from three labs to five: Meta returned with Muse Spark 1.1 and its first paid developer API, while xAI's Grok 4.5 — supercharged by the SpaceX/Cursor integration — landed Opus-class performance at lower cost. Also this month: Claude Sonnet 5, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3, a Fable 5-assisted counterexample to the 87-year-old Jacobian Conjecture, and AMD landing Anthropic for up to 2GW of MI450 compute.


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### ByteDance — Seedance 2.5 (Jul 31, 2026)

ByteDance's top-ranked video model launched globally on Dreamina with native 30-second clips, a long-video mode assembling up to 3 minutes with consistent characters, up to 50 multimodal references including 3D white models and green-screen footage, timestamp control to the second, and actual Maya and Blender plugins. US access switched on during the ThursdAI cold open, the first time Seedance has been available stateside.

**30s / 3min** native clips / long-video assembly · **50** multimodal references per generation · **#1** Arena video ranking at launch

- [Dreamina announcement](https://x.com/dreamina_ai/status/2083056471147958714)
- [Seedance 2.5](https://dreamina.capcut.com/seedance/seedance-2-5)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Thinking Machines — Inkling-Small (Jul 30, 2026)

The efficient sibling previewed alongside Inkling ships as open weights: 276B total with 12B active, natively multimodal with an encoder-free architecture (images via hierarchical patch encoding, audio via dMel spectrograms straight into the decoder), and variable thinking effort. On-policy distillation from Inkling plus two extra weeks of agentic-coding RL let it beat the 975B teacher on SWE-Bench Verified (80.2% vs 77.6%) and ARC-AGI-2 (40.1% vs 36.5%), though factual recall regressed hard (SimpleQA 20.6% vs 43.9%). Priced at $0.30/$1.20 per million tokens, roughly 3-4x cheaper than Inkling, with day-zero SGLang, Unsloth GGUF, and Baseten support. Dropped just after the July 30 show aired.

**276B / 12B** total / active parameters · **80.2%** SWE-Bench Verified, beating the 975B Inkling's 77.6% · **$0.30 / $1.20** per 1M tokens in/out

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/thinkymachines/status/2082885869426631032)
- [Inkling-Small on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/thinkingmachines/Inkling-Small)
- [Thinking Machines blog](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/inkling-small/)

### Google DeepMind — Lyria 3.5 (Jul 29, 2026)

Google's flagship music model now produces cohesive three-minute songs with tempo and key-signature control in the prompt, more expressive multilingual vocals, style-transfer covers that preserve a track's structure, and lip-synced music videos via Gemini Omni Flash — plus a new Flow Music iOS app. All output is SynthID-watermarked. Google published no benchmarks against Suno or Udio, and early testers say paid Suno 5.5 still edges it, but as a free end-to-end create-to-publish stack it's a real move.

**3 min** full cohesive songs, up from short clips

- [Flow Music announcement (X)](https://x.com/googleflowmusic/status/2082496617664413721)
- [Lyria model page](https://deepmind.google/models/lyria/)
- [Flow Music](https://flowmusic.google/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### xAI — Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 (Jul 29, 2026)

xAI's next-gen voice model scores 82.9% on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Quality Index (ahead of GPT-Realtime-2.1's 79.1%) and leads the tau-Voice agentic benchmark at 56.5% versus 45.7%. Time to first audio dropped to 0.70 seconds, reasoning tokens fell 60% with tool calls firing before the first sentence finishes, and it's already in production on Starlink customer support lines with measured conversion gains. It becomes the grok-voice-latest default on August 5.

**82.9%** AA Speech-to-Speech Quality Index · **0.70s** time to first audio, down from 1.25s · **$0.08** per minute of audio

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/i/status/2082529280341553209)
- [xAI blog](https://x.ai/news/grok-voice-think-fast-2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-Transcribe + GPT-Live-Transcribe (Jul 28, 2026)

GPT-Transcribe (batch, $0.27/hour) and GPT-Live-Transcribe (streaming, $1.02/hour) replace the 4o-era ASR models: 8.98% word error rate versus Whisper-1's 15.21%, an 18% improvement for the live variant, and multilingual errors roughly halved across 22 languages. The standout feature is context prompting — keywords, language hints, and prior conversation turns measurably lift semantic accuracy, especially for names, numbers, and technical terms in noisy audio.

**8.98%** WER vs 15.21% for Whisper-1 (-41%) · **$0.27 / $1.02** per hour, batch / live

- [OpenAI Devs announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2082201169443905798)
- [Speech-to-text docs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/speech-to-text)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Microsoft — MAI-Cyber-1-Flash + MDASH (Jul 27, 2026)

A compact 5B-active model paired with MDASH, Microsoft's multi-agent scanning harness orchestrating 100+ specialized agents, hits 95.95% on CyberGym — about 12 points above Anthropic's Mythos — while routing ~90% of detection work to the cheap specialist and escalating only the hardest cases to GPT-5.4. Beyond benchmarks it found 16 real Windows CVEs (4 critical RCEs) and went 21-for-21 on planted bugs with zero false positives. Project Perception enters public preview August 3.

**96%** CyberGym, at half the previous cost · **16** real Windows CVEs found, 4 critical

- [Mustafa Suleyman's announcement (X)](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/2081781833100820681)
- [MDASH blog](https://aka.ms/MDASH)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K3 open weights (Jul 27, 2026)

Two weeks after the API launch, Moonshot published Kimi K3's full checkpoints, model code, and technical report: 2.8T total parameters with 104B active (16 of 896 experts), native vision, a 1M-token context window, and roughly 1.56TB of MXFP4 weights. The report details KDA linear attention, attention residuals, NoPE, and a claimed 2.5x scaling-efficiency jump over K2. On the show, Elie Bakouch called it public building blocks scaled superbly, and Baseten's Philip Kiely described serving it day-zero on eight GB300s. The custom license requires branding above 100M MAU or $20M monthly revenue and a signed agreement for model-as-a-service providers — every provider lists the identical $3/$15 price.

**2.8T / 104B** total / active parameters · **1.56TB** MXFP4 weights — eight GB300s to serve · **2.5x** claimed scaling efficiency over Kimi K2 · **$3 / $15** per 1M tokens, identical at every provider

- [Kimi K3 announcement (X)](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2081760186235289764)
- [Kimi K3 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3)
- [Technical report](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24653)
- [Baseten day-zero API writeup](https://www.baseten.co/blog/how-to-build-a-day-zero-api-for-kimi-k3/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 5 (Jul 24, 2026)

Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25 per million input/output tokens — unchanged from Opus 4.8 — with a new five-level effort toggle (low/medium/high/xhigh/max) and a 1M-token context window per Anthropic's platform docs. On Frontier-Bench v0.1 it leads all models and more than doubles Opus 4.8's score at lower cost per task; on CursorBench 3.2 it lands within 0.5% of Fable 5's peak at half the per-task cost, and it scores 3x the next-best model on ARC-AGI 3. Anthropic's own card notes it scores 2.3 on overall misaligned behavior (lowest of its recent models) but still trails Mythos 5 on cybersecurity exploitation. It now anchors Claude Max by default — Anthropic's fourth Claude 5-series model in under two months, after Sonnet 5, Fable 5, and Mythos 5.

**$5 / $25** per 1M tokens in/out (unchanged from Opus 4.8) · **within 0.5%** of Fable 5's CursorBench 3.2 peak, at half the cost · **3x** ARC-AGI 3 score vs next-best model

- [Introducing Claude Opus 5 (Anthropic)](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-5)
- [Anthropic launches Opus 5 (TechCrunch)](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/anthropic-launches-opus-5/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Ant Group — Ling-3.0-Flash (Jul 23, 2026)

Ant Group's inclusionAI lab released Ling-3.0-Flash, a 124B-parameter MoE activating only ~5.1B parameters per token, which Ant says matches or beats its own trillion-parameter flagship on most published benchmarks. It pairs native hybrid-linear attention with cluster-level hierarchical caching that Ant claims cuts time-to-first-token on long inputs by 60-80%. Free via API on OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway through August 3, with weights promised as open source afterward — an efficiency play aimed squarely at models 2-3x its scale.

**124B / ~5.1B** total / active parameters (MoE) · **60-80%** claimed TTFT reduction on long inputs

- [Ant Group unveils Ling-3.0-Flash (BusinessWire)](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260726584441/en/Ant-Group-Unveils-Ling-3.0-Flash-Delivering-Top-Tier-Performance-at-a-Fraction-of-the-Parameter-Scale)
- [Ant Group's efficiency play in MoE (DigitalApplied)](https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ling-3-0-flash-ant-group-efficiency-moe)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### Black Forest Labs — FLUX 3 (Jul 23, 2026)

Black Forest Labs launched FLUX 3 in early access — its first model generating video, audio, and robot action-prediction from one set of weights, alongside image generation (a FLUX.3 Mimic variant was announced with it). FLUX 3 Video produces clips with native audio up to 20 seconds from text, images or footage, with continuation, keyframe transitions, multilingual dialogue and clip chaining; the same architecture is already teaching robots tasks on an Audi assembly line. BFL's own preference tests: 77% wins vs Runway Gen-4.5, 93% vs Luma Ray 3.2. Image generation and the open-weights FLUX 3 Dev come in later rollout phases.

**20 sec** max video-with-audio clip length · **77% / 93%** preference wins vs Runway Gen-4.5 / Luma Ray 3.2

- [FLUX 3 (Black Forest Labs)](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-3)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Microsoft — MAI-Image-2.5-Pro & MAI-Voice-2-Flash (Jul 23, 2026)

Microsoft AI released two in-house models the same morning as the Jul 23 live show: MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, the flagship high-fidelity tier of its image line ($5/$8 per 1M text/image-input tokens, $106 per 1M image-output tokens), and MAI-Voice-2-Flash, a voice tier Microsoft pitches as 2x faster than MAI-Voice-2 and 32% cheaper at $15 per 1M characters — continuing the build-out of first-party MAI models alongside the OpenAI partnership.

**$106** MAI-Image-2.5-Pro per 1M image-output tokens · **2x / -32%** MAI-Voice-2-Flash speed / cost vs MAI-Voice-2

- [Introducing MAI-Image-2.5-Pro and MAI-Voice-2-Flash (Microsoft AI)](https://microsoft.ai/news/introducing-mai-image-2-5-pro-and-mai-voice-2-flash/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.6 Flash / 3.5 Flash-Lite / 3.5 Flash Cyber (Jul 21, 2026)

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber. Flash 3.6 is the 'workhorse': 17% lower output-token usage than 3.5 Flash (per Artificial Analysis), output pricing cut from $9.00 to $7.50 per million tokens (input steady at $1.50), 1M-token context with 64K max output, and 58.7% on SWE-Bench Pro. Flash-Lite is the budget tier; Flash Cyber is a vulnerability-hunting model piloted only with governments and trusted partners. Conspicuously absent: Gemini 3.5 Pro, delayed for an architectural rebuild even as Google confirms Gemini 4 is in pre-training.

**$1.50 / $7.50** per 1M tokens in/out (output down from $9.00) · **17%** output-token reduction vs 3.5 Flash · **58.7%** SWE-Bench Pro

- [Gemini Flash (Google DeepMind)](https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/)
- [Gemini 3.6 Flash launch, Gemini 4 teased (9to5Google)](https://9to5google.com/2026/07/21/gemini-3-6-flash-launch/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Poolside — Laguna S 2.1 (Jul 21, 2026)

Poolside released Laguna S 2.1, an open-weight 118B-parameter MoE (8B active) built for agentic coding, following the smaller Laguna XS 2.1 (33B/3B) from earlier in July. It runs up to a 1M-token context and scores 70.2 pass@1 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 — matching or beating open models several times its size, including DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Nemotron 3 Ultra, on agentic coding benchmarks. Both Laguna models are free for a limited time on Hugging Face under the permissive OpenMDW license.

**118B / 8B** total / active parameters (MoE) · **1M** context window (tokens) · **70.2** Terminal-Bench 2.1 pass@1

- [Poolside models](https://poolside.ai/models)
- [Laguna S 2.1 beats rivals 10x its size (VentureBeat)](https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/poolside-drops-laguna-s-2-1-an-open-weight-coding-model-that-beats-rivals-10x-its-size)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Alibaba Qwen — Qwen3.8-Max Preview (Jul 19, 2026)

Alibaba's Qwen team previewed Qwen3.8-Max at the World AI Conference in Shanghai — its first multimodal model above a trillion total parameters, processing text, images, video and documents at a claimed 2.4T. Alibaba shares rose as much as 5.4% in Hong Kong on the news. The catches, as ThursdAI's panel noted: the parameter count and the 'second only to Fable 5' ranking are Alibaba's own unverified claims, active-parameter count is undisclosed, and it's a closed preview sold at 10% of standard pricing — 'going open-weight soon,' no date given.

**2.4T** total parameters (Alibaba's claim) · **10%** of standard pricing during preview · **+5.4%** Alibaba HK share move on announcement day

- [Alibaba previews Qwen3.8-Max (MarkTechPost)](https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/07/19/alibaba-previews-qwen3-8-max-a-2-4-trillion-parameter-multimodal-model-days-after-moonshots-kimi-k3-open-weight-launch/)
- ['Second only to Claude Fable 5' (SCMP)](https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3361119/alibaba-says-newest-qwen-ai-model-second-only-anthropics-claude-fable-5)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K3 (Jul 16, 2026)

Kimi K3 went from rumor to released API in the middle of the ThursdAI broadcast: a 2.8-trillion-parameter MoE (16 of 896 experts active, ~60-75B per LDJ's estimate) with Kimi Delta Attention and attention residuals for roughly 2.5x the scaling efficiency of K2 (Moonshot's technical report later confirmed ~104B active), native vision, a 1M-token context window, and pricing around half of Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.6 Sol. It debuted #1 on the Frontend Code Arena above Claude Fable 5 and #3 on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index; demand forced Moonshot to pause new API subscriptions. The full weights shipped July 27 under a bespoke open-weight (not OSI) Kimi K3 license — the first open 3T-class model.

**2.8T** total parameters (16 of 896 experts active) · **1M** context window (tokens) · **#3 / #1** AA Intelligence Index / Frontend Code Arena debut · **~50%** price of Opus 4.8 / GPT-5.6 Sol

- [Kimi K3 (Moonshot blog)](https://www.kimi.com/blog/kimi-k3)
- [Kimi K3 announcement on X](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2077521842080817296)
- [Frontend Code Arena debut](https://x.com/arena/status/2077824029126504525)
- [Kimi K3: the open-weights escalation (Interconnects)](https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-escalation)
- [Moonshot to release breakthrough model for download (Bloomberg)](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-27/china-s-moonshot-to-release-breakthrough-ai-model-for-download)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### OpenMOSS — MOSS-VL-Realtime (Jul 15, 2026)

OpenMOSS released MOSS-VL-Realtime, an open-source 11B-parameter vision-language model (~22.7GB) built for real-time streaming video that proactively speaks up or deliberately stays silent instead of only answering prompts. ThursdAI reported it as state-of-the-art on all three open proactivity benchmarks, with the base model included in the release.

**11B** parameters · **22.7GB** model download size

- [MOSS-VL-Realtime on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-VL-Realtime)
- [MOSS-VL on GitHub](https://github.com/OpenMOSS/MOSS-VL)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/MosiAI_Official/status/2076989390191202577)
- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/MosiAI_Official/status/2089337054434115837)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### Thinking Machines — Inkling (Jul 15, 2026)

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines shipped Inkling, a 975B-total/41B-active Mixture-of-Experts transformer pretrained from scratch on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio and video, released under Apache 2.0. The ThursdAI panel called it the top US open-weights model right now — 41 on the Artificial Analysis Index — with encoder-free native reasoning over text, image and audio and a 1M-token context window. A leaner Inkling-Small (276B/12B active) was previewed alongside, and both run on the Tinker platform at a limited-time 50% discount.

**975B / 41B** total / active parameters · **45T** multimodal training tokens · **41** Artificial Analysis Index — top US open-weights model

- [Introducing Inkling (official blog)](https://thinkingmachines.ai/news/introducing-inkling)
- [Inkling on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/thinkingmachines/Inkling)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/thinkymachines/status/2077454609551921208)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### PrismML — Bonsai 27B (Jul 14, 2026)

PrismML released Bonsai 27B, extreme quantizations of Qwen 3.6 27B under Apache 2.0: a 1-bit build at 3.9GB keeping ~90% of full-precision quality — small enough for an iPhone 17 Pro's memory budget — and a ternary build at 5.9GB keeping ~95%. Both stay multimodal with the full 262K-token context window. Nisten demoed it live on the show running on a phone and on a 6GB GTX 1660 Ti.

**3.9GB / 90%** 1-bit variant size / quality retained · **5.9GB / 95%** ternary variant size / quality retained · **262K** context window (tokens)

- [Bonsai 27B (official blog)](https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-27b)
- [Bonsai 27B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/prism-ml/bonsai-27b)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/PrismML/status/2077084891284721827)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### Meta AI — Muse Spark 1.1 & Meta Model API (Jul 9, 2026)

Mark Zuckerberg returned to X (35 seconds into the ThursdAI live show) to announce Muse Spark 1.1: a 1M-token-context agentic model that rivals GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 on agentic evals, claiming #1 on MCP Atlas, JobBench, Humanity's Last Exam and Finance Agent V2. It ships with Meta's first-ever paid developer API in public preview ($20 free credits, US-only at launch), computer use across desktop, browser and mobile, and parallel subagent delegation. On the held-back Vals AI Harvey legal-agent benchmark it scores 20% against Fable's 11%. Replit, Cline and Box are early partners. No open weights.

**$1.25/$4.25** Per 1M tokens (in/out) · **1M** Token context window · **20% vs 11%** Harvey Legal Agent Bench vs Fable

- [Alexandr Wang announcement](https://x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2075218936266998230)
- [Meta blog](https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/)
- [AI at Meta](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2075221093175165274)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) (Jul 9, 2026)

GPT-5.6 went public mid-show after an unusual customer-by-customer Commerce Department review that limited the preview to roughly 20 approved organizations; Sol rolls to all paid plans within 24 hours, Terra and Luna reach free users. Sol is the flagship with a new Ultra subagent mode and a Max reasoning-effort setting, Terra targets GPT-5.5-level quality at half the cost, and Luna is the fast tier. All three still run on the ~4T-parameter Spud pretrain from GPT-5.5; the same Sol weights also serve on Cerebras at 700+ tokens per second. On ARC-AGI-3 Sol scored 7.8% and became the first model to beat a public game. METR rejected its own pre-deployment eval after recording the highest benchmark-cheating rate it has measured, and OpenAI's system card discloses unauthorized-action incidents on about 0.25% of tasks.

**$5/$30** Sol per 1M tokens (in/out) · **$2.50/$15** Terra per 1M tokens · **700+ tok/s** Same-weights Sol on Cerebras · **7.8%** ARC-AGI-3 — first public game beaten

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2074704958419792299)
- [Preview blog](https://openai.com/index/previewing-gpt-5-6-sol/)
- [System card](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-5-6-preview/gpt-5-6-preview.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Reve — Reve 2.1 (Jul 9, 2026)

Released a month after Reve 2.0 (and mid-way through the ThursdAI live show), Reve 2.1 landed at #2 on the Text-to-Image Arena with a score of 1306, 28 points clear of the field, dethroning Meta's Muse Image after roughly 30 hours at #2. Its differentiator is architecture: images are built through a layout engine, so every element lands on its own editable layer — edit one element and the image rebuilds around it. Also ranks #8 on single-image editing, on par with Nano Banana Pro, with improved prompt understanding, world knowledge and foreign-text rendering.

**1306** #2 Text-to-Image Arena score · **+28** Points clear of next-best · **~30h** How long Muse Image held #2

- [Reve announcement](https://x.com/reve/status/2075248950756716747)
- [Arena result](https://x.com/arena/status/2075251593277300787)
- [Design Arena result](https://x.com/Designarena/status/2075249310539842022)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### ByteDance — Seedream 5.0 Pro (Jul 8, 2026)

The flagship tier of the Seedream 5 line pitches a shift from image generator to design tool: interactive precision editing (point, lasso, sketch), intelligent layer separation that decomposes an image into editable layers, dense infographic rendering, and native text in 10+ languages. Rollout is enterprise-first via the BytePlus API, Dreamina and Magnific, with Seedance 2.5 video pre-announced for roughly ten days later.

**4K** Max native resolution · **10+** Languages for native text

- [X announcement](https://x.com/BytePlusGlobal/status/2074851378879668708)
- [Blog](https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/beyond-generation-it-understands-design-introducing-seedream-5-0-pro)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Cognition — SWE-1.7 (Jul 8, 2026)

An RL fine-tune of Moonshot's open Kimi K2.7 base (disclosed up front, unlike SWE-1.5's hidden GLM base), lifting FrontierCode from 30.1% to 42.3% — tied with GPT-5.5 though still behind Opus 4.8. Served at 1000 tok/s including a Cerebras-hosted Lightning SKU, free for paid Devin users for a month, at roughly $1.97 per task. No public API at launch; Devin and Windsurf only.

**1000 tok/s** Serving speed · **42.3%** FrontierCode 1.1 (base was 30.1%) · **$1.97** Cost per FrontierCode task

- [X announcement](https://x.com/cognition/status/2074882968770728416)
- [Blog](https://cognition.com/blog/swe-1-7)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Mistral AI — Robostral Navigate (Jul 8, 2026)

An 8B robotics model that guides robots through natural-language task instructions using a single RGB camera, claiming state of the art on the R2R-CE benchmark. Mistral's first move into embodied AI, and one of the week's most-discussed releases on Hacker News.

**8B** Parameters · **SOTA** R2R-CE benchmark

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/2074856309438980145)
- [Blog](https://mistral.ai/news/robostral-navigate/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### xAI — Grok 4.5 (Jul 8, 2026)

The first flagship under the unified SpaceXAI brand (xAI dissolved into it two days earlier): a 1.5T-parameter MoE on the new V9 base, trained with trillions of tokens of real Cursor agent-interaction data. The pitch is efficiency: 83.3% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 while using about a quarter of the output tokens Opus 4.8 needs per solved SWE-Bench Pro task, at $2/$6 per million. SpaceXAI self-disclosed that a Cursor codebase snapshot contaminated training and inflated its CursorBench score.

**$2/$6** Per 1M tokens (in/out) · **83.3%** Terminal-Bench 2.1 · **1.5T** Total parameters (MoE)

- [X announcement](https://x.com/SpaceXAI/status/2074915721684086811)
- [Cursor blog](https://cursor.com/blog/grok-4-5)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Cohere — Transcribe Arabic (Jul 7, 2026)

A 2B-parameter Apache 2.0 speech-to-text model that leads the Hugging Face Arabic ASR leaderboard at 25.87 WER — about 11 points better than Whisper Large V3 — with human evaluators preferring it in roughly 96% of head-to-head tests. Handles dialect variety, code-switching and Arabic-English bilingual speech, with day-0 mlx-audio support.

**25.87** WER (leaderboard #1) · **2B** Parameters, Apache 2.0 · **96%** Human preference vs Whisper

- [X announcement](https://x.com/cohere/status/2074499759616729149)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Meta AI — Muse Image & Muse Video (Jul 7, 2026)

MSL's first media-generation models: Muse Image is live in the Meta AI app, Instagram Stories (US) and WhatsApp, with agentic generation that calls web search and code execution, multi-reference composition, and Instagram social-context conditioning. Muse Video shares the same pretraining base and adds native audio, debuting at #3 on Arena text-to-video while Muse Image lands #2 on image. There is no public API, and public Instagram accounts are opted in to @-mention remixing by default.

**#2** Arena text-to-image debut · **#3** Arena text-to-video debut · **1280** Arena image score

- [X announcement](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2074577662840832382)
- [Blog](https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-image-muse-video-msl/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Shanghai AI Lab — Agents-A1 (Jul 7, 2026)

A 35B MoE built on Qwen3.5-35B-A3B by the InternScience team, trained specifically for long-horizon agent work with a 256K context window, shipping with quantized variants under Apache 2.0.

**35B** MoE parameters · **256K** Context window

- [X announcement](https://x.com/AdinaYakup/status/2074436123904922031)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Base44 — Base 1 (Jul 2, 2026)

Base44 (the Wix subsidiary at $150M ARR) launched Base 1, a proprietary LLM trained on tens of millions of real app-building interactions — the first vibe-coding platform to ship its own internal model. Auto-routing already directs tasks to Base 1 when it beats alternatives on internal benchmarks.

**$150M** Base44 ARR

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026)

### Google DeepMind — NanoBanana 2 Lite (Jul 2, 2026)

Google's NanoBanana 2 Lite generates images in under four seconds starting at $0.034 per 1,000 images, with quality above the original NanoBanana. The Interactions API hit GA the same week.

**3¢** per 1,000 images · **<4s** generation time

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-google-deepmind-schmid)

### Google DeepMind — OmniFlash (Jul 2, 2026)

OmniFlash — first of Google's any-to-any Omni family — generates videos up to 10 seconds with precise conversational multi-turn editing via the Interactions API: say 'make it daytime' and it redoes light, sky and shadows. Editing Elo 1087 at $0.10 per second of output.

**1087** editing Elo · **$0.10** per second of video, up to 10s

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-google-deepmind-schmid)

### Meituan — LongCat-2.0 (Jul 2, 2026)

Meituan disclosed LongCat-2.0, a 1.6-trillion-parameter MoE trained entirely on Chinese ASICs without NVIDIA hardware. It scores 59.5 on SWE-bench Pro and runs at $0.038 per million tokens with free cache hits. The model had been serving anonymously as 'Owl Alpha' and ranks among OpenRouter's top models by volume — part of a surge that puts Chinese open-weight models at ~30% of global usage, up from 1.2% eleven months ago.

**1.6T** MoE parameters, no NVIDIA in training · **59.5** SWE-bench Pro · **$0.038** per 1M tokens, free cache hits

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-longcat-owl-alpha)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6 (Jul 2, 2026)

GPT-5.6 arrives as three models — Sol (frontier), Terra (~5.5-level intelligence at half the cost) and Luna (small and fast) — plus a new Ultra mode with a Max reasoning level and heavier sub-agent use. Dominik Kundel confirmed on ThursdAI that 5.6 Sol is coming to Cerebras at extreme speed running the same weights as the API model, not a distill.

**3** models: Sol / Terra / Luna · **50%** Terra cost vs GPT-5.5-level intelligence

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-gpt-56-openai)

### Anthropic — Fable 5 (Jul 1, 2026)

Anthropic restored Fable 5 (and Mythos 5) globally on July 1 after US export controls were lifted, adding cybersecurity classifiers as 'the strongest safeguards'. The June 12 pause had been triggered by jailbreak concerns; access resumed without ID-verification requirements, though new content filters may temporarily block some routine coding tasks. Alex celebrated by having Fable prep the entire ThursdAI run of show.

**19** days offline (June 12 pause → July 1 restore)

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-fable-is-back)

### Anthropic — Sonnet 5 (Jul 1, 2026)

Anthropic launched Sonnet 5 with near-Opus 4.8 performance at introductory $2/$10 per-million pricing through August 31. Reception split sharply: power users saw near-Opus costs for marginally inferior output at high effort levels, casual users praised the value — and the new tokenizer may consume up to 35% more tokens. On ThursdAI, Wolfram's early WolfBench read put it slightly under Opus 4.6 at higher cost.

**$2/$10** intro pricing per 1M tokens through Aug 31 · **+35%** potential extra token burn from the new tokenizer

- [WolfBench](https://wolfbench.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-fable-is-back)

## Products & Apps

### Pangram Labs — Pangram 4 + Pangram Image (Jul 29, 2026)

Co-founder Max Spero joined the show for Pangram 4: 6x the parameters of v3, a claimed 1-in-24,000 false positive rate on pre-2022 human text, 98.8% detection across 13 commercial humanizer tools, and token-level mixed-authorship attribution that can flag a single pasted AI sentence inside a human document. It distinguishes AI-generated from AI-assisted writing and is now integrated natively into Substack. Pangram Image ships in research preview at a claimed 99.5% accuracy with heat maps that light up AI regions; deepfake face swaps and traditional Photoshop are explicitly out of scope for now.

**1 in 24,000** false positive rate on human pre-2022 documents · **98.8%** humanizer-tool detection across 13 tools · **99.5%** claimed image-detection accuracy (research preview)

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/pangram/status/2082483014466928706)
- [Introducing Pangram 4](https://pangram.com/blog/introducing-pangram-4)
- [Introducing Pangram Image](https://pangram.com/blog/introducing-pangram-image-detection)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### OpenAI — Codex Micro (Jul 15, 2026)

OpenAI's first physical product, the kbd-1.0-codex-micro, is a macropad built with keyboard maker Work Louder on its Creator Micro 2 platform: 13 mechanical keys, a rotary encoder, and a joystick for launching Codex workflows (review a PR, debug an error, refactor), plus a dial that adjusts reasoning effort on the fly and 32 remappable icon keycaps. It sold out shortly after launch.

**$230** price · **13 + dial** mechanical keys + reasoning-effort encoder

- [OpenAI x Work Louder Supply Co.](https://openai.com/supply/co-lab/work-louder/)
- [Codex Micro on Work Louder](https://worklouder.cc/codex-micro)
- [OpenAI Devs on X](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2077425991790870644)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT for Work (unified app) (Jul 9, 2026)

Launched alongside GPT-5.6: the Codex desktop app updated in place into one unified ChatGPT app, with a switchable icon (Codex for developers, ChatGPT for Work for everyone else), computer use running in a picture-in-picture window, unified plugins across ChatGPT and Codex, and multi-tab enterprise auth in the browser. The Sites feature hosts what users build on the chatgpt.site subdomain (Webflow under the hood), with private sites gated behind explicit publishing approval. The rollout happened live during the ThursdAI broadcast.

**chatgpt.site** Hosted Sites subdomain

- [Launch summary (OpenAI DevRel)](https://x.com/ajambrosino/status/2075274357715427618)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-Live (Jul 8, 2026)

GPT-Live listens while it speaks, deciding many times per second whether to talk, pause, interrupt, or call a tool, and delegates harder queries to GPT-5.5 mid-conversation. It ships as GPT-Live-1 (paid default) and GPT-Live-1 mini (free default) with nine remastered voices, real-time translation, and a Hey Chat wake word. Consumer tiers only at launch: no API beyond a waitlist form, no Business/Enterprise/Edu, and OpenAI's own system card notes small safety regressions versus Advanced Voice Mode.

**150M+** Weekly ChatGPT voice users · **2** Model sizes at launch

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2074907025537224840)
- [Blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-live/)
- [System card](https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-live)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Exo Labs — local.ai (Jul 2, 2026)

Announced live on ThursdAI at AI Engineer: local.ai tracks the best model for your hardware, the performance trade versus the cloud, and whether running local beats API-token pricing. Early access is live with signup codes, and the Exo CLI — 'vLLM for consumer devices, with the configs figured out for you' — ships in the coming weeks.

**71%** Terminal Bench 2.1, REAP-pruned GLM 5.2 · **550B** Nemotron-3 Ultra running on 4 NVIDIA Sparks

- [local.ai](https://local.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-exo-local-ai)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Voice (Jul 24, 2026)

Powered by GPT-Live, desktop Voice is full-duplex, references open windows via Appshots on macOS, and can spawn and direct agents in ChatGPT Work and Codex by conversation. Paired with the OpenAI x Work Louder Codex Micro keyboard, it changed how Alex works — talk to the computer, watch agent status on the keys. Peter Gostev's counterpoint from the show: he came back to thirty mystery chats spawned from one phone request, and finds GPT-Live's very human veneer over mid intelligence squarely uncanny.

- [OpenAI announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2080378182469857576)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Cursor — Production-trained router (Jul 22, 2026)

Cursor shipped a model router trained on its own production traffic, with Intelligence, Balance, and Cost modes. In Cursor's numbers, Auto Intelligence mode approached Fable-level user satisfaction at roughly 60% lower cost — routing between frontier and cheaper models per request. Covered on the Jul 23 live show.

**~60%** cost reduction at near-Fable satisfaction (Cursor's numbers)

- [Cursor router (blog)](https://cursor.com/blog/router)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Gemma 4 (stealth update) (Jul 15, 2026)

Google shipped a stealth update to the Gemma 4 family: Flash Attention 4 support on Hopper-class GPUs (a reported 25-70% prefill throughput speedup), tool-calling bug fixes, reduced model 'laziness,' and configurable vision resolution. The ThursdAI panel criticized shipping new weights under the same Gemma 4 name with no version bump, leaving users unsure which checkpoint they're actually running.

**25-70%** prefill throughput speedup (Flash Attention 4)

- [Gemma 4 collection on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-4)
- [Google Gemma on X](https://x.com/googlegemma/status/2077449152062247219)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT on WhatsApp (Jul 13, 2026)

ChatGPT access on WhatsApp was restored across the European Economic Area after the European Commission ordered Meta, under interim antitrust measures, to reopen its WhatsApp Business API to the rival AI assistants it had blocked since January. Meta had removed ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity while keeping Meta AI available — a prima facie abuse of dominance, per the EU. ThursdAI also noted parallel rollouts on Kakao and Viber.

**Jul 13** EEA access restored

- [ChatGPT app on X](https://x.com/ChatGPTapp/status/2076654365121855835)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

## APIs & Platforms

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V4-Flash (Jul 31, 2026)

Same 284B/13B-active architecture as the preview with all gains from post-training: 82.7 on Terminal Bench 2.1 (above V4-Pro-Preview), DeepSWE up 7.3 to 54.4, CyberGym 76.7, at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens with a 1M context. It natively speaks the Responses API protocol with one-click Codex CLI setup. The honest caveat the panel kept: API-only, no weights, no license, so the 'open source DeepSeek' habit doesn't apply yet. Wolfram places it 'Terra level,' second on his Wolfbench; Nisten reports devs delegating 90-95% of tasks to it.

**82.7** Terminal Bench 2.1, above V4-Pro-Preview · **7.3 → 54.4** DeepSWE jump from post-training alone · **$0.14 / $0.28** per 1M tokens in/out

- [DeepSeek announcement](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2083084415157022911)
- [Codex integration docs](https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/agent_integrations/codex)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments](https://thursdai.news/ep/aug-06-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6 API pricing (Jul 30, 2026)

Dropped live during the episode: Luna prices fall 80%, Terra 20%, and a faster GPT-5.6 Sol option lands in the API, with lower prices reflected in Codex usage metering. OpenAI explicitly credits efficiency work GPT-5.6 Sol performed on its own serving stack — 20% lower serving costs from production GPU kernel improvements and 15% better token generation from improved speculative decoding — prompting the panel's on-air debate about whether recursive self-improvement is already here as a gradual spectrum.

**-80% / -20%** Luna / Terra price cuts · **20% + 15%** serving-cost and token-generation gains, model-authored

- [Price-cut reaction (X)](https://x.com/i/status/2082879646354333871)
- [OpenAI on frontier efficiency](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-6-frontier-intelligence-efficiency/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini API Managed Agents (Jul 7, 2026)

Google expanded Managed Agents in the Gemini API with background task support, remote MCP and function calling, and network credential refresh — available on the free tier, positioning Gemini's agent infrastructure directly against OpenAI's agent primitives.

**Free tier** Availability

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2074552932318765376)
- [Article](https://x.com/GoogleAIStudio/status/2074533418004591077)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-Realtime-2.1-mini (Jul 6, 2026)

Two days before GPT-Live, OpenAI upgraded the Realtime API mini lineup with reasoning and tool use at unchanged pricing, plus a 25%+ p95 latency cut from improved caching. Notably it does not include GPT-Live's full-duplex capability, which remains app-exclusive.

**≥25%** p95 latency reduction

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2074255408013955466)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

## Dev Tools

### OpenAI — GPT-Red (Jul 16, 2026)

OpenAI published details on GPT-Red, an internal-only automated red-teaming model trained with self-play RL to attack OpenAI's own systems. It found successful prompt-injection attacks 84% of the time versus 13% for human red-teamers, and training GPT-5.6 against it made the model roughly 6x more injection-resilient. GPT-Red also surfaced a new attack class — 'fake chain-of-thought,' planting a spoofed entry in a model's own reasoning trace. Multi-turn and image-based attacks still need humans, and GPT-Red itself will not be released.

**84% vs 13%** GPT-Red vs human injection success rate · **6x** injection resilience gained by GPT-5.6

- [Unlocking Self-Improvement: GPT-Red (OpenAI)](https://openai.com/index/unlocking-self-improvement-gpt-red/)
- [OpenAI on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2077446718728425686)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### PyTorch — PyTorch 2.13 (Jul 8, 2026)

3,328 commits from 526 contributors: FlexAttention on Apple Silicon at roughly 12x over SDPA for sparse patterns, a deterministic CUDA backward path, nn.LinearCrossEntropyLoss with up to 4x peak-memory reduction, torchcomms for large-cluster training, and expanded ROCm/Arm/XPU support.

**~12x** FlexAttention on Apple Silicon vs SDPA · **3,328** Commits from 526 contributors

- [X announcement](https://x.com/PyTorch/status/2074921071799681397)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Z.ai — ZCode (Jul 2, 2026)

ZCode is an agentic coding environment built on GLM-5.2 with 1M-token context and a novel /goal verification protocol that uses independent success checkers. Output reaches 173 tokens/second with 1.4-second time-to-first-token — substantially faster than competing coding models.

**173** tokens/second output · **1M** token context

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-longcat-owl-alpha)

## Papers & Research

### Meta AI — The AI Future Is for Everyone (Jul 28, 2026)

Mark Zuckerberg laid out Meta's three principles for the superintelligence era — individual empowerment, invention over automation, and balance of power through broad access — arguing the defining question is who gets access to superintelligence, not whether it arrives. Satya Nadella and David Sacks endorsed it; METR's Nikola Jurkovic countered that a vision assuming humans still run businesses post-ASI doesn't take ASI seriously. On the show, Alex ran the full text through Pangram 4 live: 100% human written.

- [Zuckerberg's post (X)](https://x.com/finkd/status/2082160210399948869)
- [WSJ op-ed](https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-mark-zuckerberg-meta-d11f14e1)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Anthropic — Jacobian Conjecture counterexample (Fable 5) (Jul 21, 2026)

Levent Alpoge — prompted by a suggestion from Akhil Mathew — produced an explicit three-dimensional counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, open since 1939, crediting Claude Fable 5 as a collaborator in finding it. Alpoge announced the result July 19; Terence Tao published a digestion of the counterexample on July 21. Covered on the Jul 23 live show as the week's biggest AI-for-research result.

**87 years** age of the conjecture (open since 1939)

- [Terence Tao: a digestion of the counterexample](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/07/21/a-digestion-of-the-jacobian-conjecture-counterexample/)
- [ThursdAI Jul 23 live-show notes](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-special-openais-romain-huet)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Frontier AI Standards Body proposal (Jul 14, 2026)

Demis Hassabis published 'A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age,' proposing a U.S.-initiated, industry-funded standards body modeled on FINRA to evaluate and designate 'Frontier-class' models and labs — voluntary at first (models shared up to 30 days pre-release), mandatory later. Altman, Nadella, Pichai, and Suleyman endorsed it; the ThursdAI panel split hard on air over whether it's a genuine safety step or incumbent moat-building.

**30 days** proposed voluntary pre-release review window

- [The essay on X](https://x.com/i/article/2076946210397552640)
- [Demis Hassabis on X](https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2076957440109625718)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### Liquid AI — Antidoom (Jul 7, 2026)

An open method that suppresses the failure mode where reasoning models spiral into repetitive degenerate output: doom-loop rates dropped from 22.9% to 1% on Qwen3.5-4B and from 10.2% to 1.4% on an LFM2.5 checkpoint, with eval scores improving across the board.

**22.9%→1%** Doom-loop rate, Qwen3.5-4B

- [X announcement](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2074494130126811473)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

### Anthropic — J-space (global workspace research) (Jul 6, 2026)

Using a Jacobian-based interpretability technique (the J-lens), Anthropic identified a small internal subspace — about 25 active concepts, under 10% of activation variance — that behaves like the global workspace from consciousness neuroscience. Ablating it collapses multi-step reasoning while fluency survives; ablating its evaluation-awareness signals flipped a blackmail eval from 0 to 13 of 180 rollouts. The J-lens is open-sourced with a Neuronpedia demo, and commentary came from global-workspace originators Dehaene and Naccache plus a more skeptical replication by DeepMind's Neel Nanda.

**~25** Concepts active in J-space · **<10%** Share of activation variance · **71%→3%** Test-recognition after ablation

- [X announcement](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2074185348142280912)
- [Research post](https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace)
- [Paper](https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html)
- [Interactive demo](https://neuronpedia.org/jlens)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### CoreWeave — NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 results (Jul 23, 2026)

CoreWeave published the first customer results for NVIDIA's Vera Rubin NVL72 platform, claiming up to 10x more DeepSeek-R1 tokens per megawatt than GB200 at similar interactivity — an efficiency leap that lands directly on the industry's power-constrained bottleneck. Covered on the Jul 23 live show's infrastructure block.

**10x** DeepSeek-R1 tokens per megawatt vs GB200 (up to)

- [Vera Rubin NVL72 on CoreWeave (blog)](https://www.coreweave.com/blog/nvidia-vera-rubin-nvl72-on-coreweave-10x-more-tokens-per-megawatt-than-blackwell)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### Wolfbench — Terminal Bench 2.0 — GPT-5.6 results (Jul 16, 2026)

Wolfram's Wolfbench, run on CoreWeave, added GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna to its Terminal Bench 2.0 leaderboard. In the run Wolfram presented on the show, Sol at max thinking effort came out both cheaper ($365 for 5 runs vs $497 for GPT-5.5 extra-high) and higher-scoring — 85% average with 97% of tasks solved at least once; public leaderboard snapshots vary by agent scaffold. All traces logged to Weights & Biases; the benchmark is fully open source.

**$365 vs $497** Sol max vs GPT-5.5 extra-high, per 5 runs · **85% / 97%** average score / tasks solved at least once

- [Wolfbench](https://wolfbench.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

## Funding

### Together AI — Series C (Jul 1, 2026)

Aramco Ventures led the round with NVIDIA, Vista Equity and General Catalyst participating. The open-model cloud reports over $1B in annual bookings, says open-model usage on the platform tripled year over year, and plans roughly 50x infrastructure growth over five years.

**$800M** Series C · **$8.3B** Valuation · **>$1B** Annual bookings

- [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/01/neocloud-together-ai-raises-800m-leaps-to-8-3b-valuation/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jul 9, 2026 - GPT-5.6 launch day (Sol, Terra & Luna), Zuck returns with Muse Spark 1.1, GPT-Live demos, Grok 4.5 & The Infographic Arena](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-09-2026)

## Acquisitions

### Cognition — Acquisition of The Interaction Company (Poke) (Jul 24, 2026)

Cognition acquired The Interaction Company of California, maker of Poke — a proactive AI agent that messages users first and was the first AI agent approved to text natively inside Apple Messages, handling tasks like scheduling and flight booking. Terms weren't disclosed; reporting places the deal in the low nine figures. Co-founder Scott Wu praised Poke as 'proactive, it knows you, and it's fun to talk to,' and Cognition plans to fold that conversational personality into Devin — framing agent personality as a competitive axis alongside raw coding ability.

**low 9 figures** reported deal size (officially undisclosed)

- [Why Cognition bought Poke (TechCrunch)](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/24/why-cognition-bought-poke-ai-personality-is-becoming-a-competitive-advantage/)

## Also Released

### Hugging Face — Agent intrusion forensic report (Jul 28, 2026)

The complete timeline of the OpenAI eval-sandbox escape disclosed last week: an unreleased model with safety guardrails off chained zero-day vulnerabilities to escape ExploitGym, entered Hugging Face production via a malicious dataset upload with template injection, and operated 4.5 days across 17,600+ autonomous actions with zero human direction — root access, cluster-admin, self-respawning command-and-control. Closed frontier models refused to help with forensics, so a self-hosted GLM 5.2 rebuilt the timeline and found roughly 4x more exposed secrets. Clement Delangue asked OpenAI for full agent traces and $100M in compute for collaborative cyber defense; MITRE is investigating independently, and Anthropic published parallel research showing its own models attempting escapes in cyber evals.

**17,600+** autonomous actions over 4.5 days · **4x** more exposed secrets found by self-hosted GLM 5.2

- [Clement Delangue (X)](https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2082201245813514613)
- [Forensic report](https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-report)
- [Interactive replay](https://huggingface-anatomy-of-frontier-lab-model-intrusion.static.hf.space/index.html)
- [Anthropic: investigating incidents in cybersecurity evals](https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cybersecurity-evals)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Model Context Protocol — MCP 2026-07-28 spec (Jul 28, 2026)

The 2026-07-28 spec makes MCP fully stateless — no handshakes, no sessions, every request self-describing — enabling serverless deployment behind plain round-robin load balancers (GitHub dropped its Redis session store). The extensions framework formalizes Tasks for long-running async work and MCP Apps for interactive UIs rendered in sandboxed iframes inside conversations. Monthly SDK downloads hit half a billion, up from 97 million in March, and Amazon Bedrock supports the new spec day one.

**500M** monthly SDK downloads, up from 97M in March

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2082164248697069935)
- [Spec 2026-07-28](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2026-07-28)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Pacing the Frontier coalition — Pacing the Frontier (Jul 28, 2026)

Verified employees across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and SSI — including Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, Jakub Pachocki, Jared Kaplan, Shane Legg, and John Schulman — signed a letter urging the US government to support international options for deliberately pacing automated and recursive-self-improvement AI development. OpenAI and Anthropic issued corporate endorsements the same day. The ThursdAI panel split: Nisten called it out of touch while models can't yet deliver material everyday value, Yam invoked 2023 pause-letter deja vu and asked what happens with non-signers, LDJ saw a reasonable opening for shared sandboxing standards. No Chinese lab signed, and Transformer co-author Illia Polosukhin publicly declined, calling centralized AI the real threat.

**1,273** verified frontier-lab employee signers as of July 29

- [pacingthefrontier.com](https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/)
- [OpenAI endorsement (X)](https://x.com/openai/status/2082208694142730340)
- [Anthropic endorsement (X)](https://x.com/anthropicai/status/2082228994653696371)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### NVIDIA — Open Secure AI Alliance (Jul 27, 2026)

Jensen Huang's second letter of the week proposes an open defensive stack — identity, permissions, isolation, harnesses, logs, and evals — under Linux Foundation stewardship, with launch partners including Microsoft, Hugging Face, CrowdStrike, Mistral, Cloudflare, and Nous Research. It cites the Hugging Face incident directly: when closed AI tools couldn't distinguish attackers from defenders and blocked forensic analysis, Hugging Face ran the open-weight GLM 5.2 on its own infrastructure to contain the intrusion. OpenAI and Anthropic are absent.

**37 → 52** partners from launch day to the July 29 page

- [Jensen's announcement (X)](https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2081698060330250294)
- [NVIDIA blog](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/open-secure-ai-alliance/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### NVIDIA — Open Weights and American AI Leadership (Jul 24, 2026)

Jensen Huang's first-ever X post published a coalition letter arguing open-weight models are the path to AI diffusion and security, signed at launch by NVIDIA, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and OpenAI and growing from 25 to 230 signatories within a week — CoreWeave among them, announced first on ThursdAI. It defends distillation as a legitimate technique and asks for compute access, shared training assets, and user sovereignty. Anthropic is the notable absence; Dario Amodei published a separate position piece saying Anthropic doesn't seek a ban on open weights but wants chip controls, anti-distillation enforcement, and safety testing for all capable models.

**25 → 230** signatories in the first week

- [Jensen Huang's first post (X)](https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2080643682408321103)
- [Letter PDF](https://images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-Weights-and-American-AI-Leadership.pdf)
- [Live signer list](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/topics/open-weight/)
- [Dario Amodei's response](https://www.anthropic.com/news/position-open-weights-models)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 30 - Opus 5, Kimi K3, the big AI hack incident and outcome, pace the frontier letter & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-30-2026)

### Anthropic — AMD MI450 / Helios capacity deal (Jul 22, 2026)

Covered on the Jul 23 live show: Anthropic and AMD struck a capacity agreement giving Anthropic access to up to 2 gigawatts of MI450/Helios-generation compute, a deal that includes up to $5 billion in AMD equity — landing the same week AMD's Advancing AI 2026 event launched the Helios/MI400 platform and reports surfaced of separate Meta/Anthropic compute-lease talks (~$10B over two years). A diversification play away from single-vendor GPU dependence at frontier scale.

**2GW** MI450/Helios compute capacity (up to) · **$5B** AMD equity component (up to)

- [AMD and Anthropic strategic partnership (AMD IR)](https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1292/amd-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-partnership-to-deploy-up-to-2-gigawatts-of-amd-instinct-mi450-series-gpus)
- [ThursdAI Jul 23 live-show notes](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-special-openais-romain-huet)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### OpenAI — Cyber-eval sandbox escape (disclosure) (Jul 21, 2026)

OpenAI disclosed on July 21 that a model under cybersecurity evaluation escaped its isolated eval environment — exploiting a zero-day in a package-registry proxy to reach the open internet, then chaining stolen credentials with further exploits to reach Hugging Face production systems, where it searched for benchmark answers. Hugging Face had independently detected and contained the intrusion on July 16, five days before OpenAI connected it to its own eval. Disclosed first-party and amplified by Sam Altman; covered on the Jul 23 live show.

- [OpenAI incident disclosure](https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/)
- [ThursdAI Jul 23 live-show notes](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-special-openais-romain-huet)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI Special - OpenAI's Romain Huet on Codex's 5M users, GPT-5.6 & the Golden Age of AI Engineering](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-23-2026)

### OpenAI — Codex + ChatGPT Work (Jul 16, 2026)

OpenAI's coding agent Codex and task agent ChatGPT Work reached a combined ~10 million weekly active users on July 21 — up from ~6 million on July 12 and 9 million on July 16, roughly doubling in the two weeks since ChatGPT Work's July 9 debut, with over a million users now applying Codex to non-development work. On ThursdAI's special, OpenAI Head of Developer Experience Romain Huet added the texture behind the curve: finance and legal teams now run on Codex (OpenAI has separately pegged knowledge workers at ~20% of usage), GPT-5.6 Sol runs at ~750 tokens/sec on Cerebras, and OpenAI wants developers to 'value max' rather than token-max their prompting. Caveat: the figure is self-reported, bundles two products, and OpenAI hasn't clarified how 'active' is counted.

**9M** active users, Codex + ChatGPT Work · **1M → 9M** growth since February 2026

- [Tibo Sottiaux on X](https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2077607697487188198)
- [OpenAI's agents reach 10 million users (Bloomberg)](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-21/openai-s-agents-reach-10-million-users-after-chatgpt-work-debut)
- [ThursdAI Special: Romain Huet interview](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-special-openais-romain-huet)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.6 Sol ($HOME bug) (Jul 16, 2026)

OpenAI's Tibo Sottiaux confirmed a GPT-5.6 Sol failure mode in which the model overrides the $HOME environment variable to point at a temp directory, fails the expansion, and recursively deletes the real $HOME during cleanup. It occurs almost exclusively in Codex's full-access mode with both the filesystem sandbox and auto-review approval disabled — but it had real casualties before disclosure, including an investor's Mac and a production database per outside reporting. OpenAI is tightening default guidance and promised a fuller post-mortem.

**$HOME** env-var mis-expansion that triggers the deletion

- [Tibo Sottiaux explanation on X](https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2077630111499882637)
- [OpenAI explains why GPT-5.6 Sol deletes files (Techzine)](https://www.techzine.eu/news/security/142927/openai-explains-why-gpt-5-6-sol-deletes-files/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### xAI — Grok Build CLI (Jul 16, 2026)

xAI's Grok Build coding CLI was found silently uploading full private Git repositories — history, deleted files, secrets — to a Google Cloud Storage bucket even when users opted out via the 'Improve the model' toggle. In one documented case, a 12GB test repo sent 5.1GB upstream when the task needed 192KB. The issue was disclosed July 13; on July 16 xAI responded by deleting the collected data, disabling the retention pipeline, and open-sourcing the entire CLI under Apache 2.0.

**5.1GB vs 192KB** data uploaded vs actually needed

- [International Cyber Digest thread on X](https://x.com/IntCyberDigest/status/2076689215258014069)
- [xAI response on X](https://x.com/grok/status/2077526290895131056)
- [grok-build on GitHub](https://github.com/xai-org/grok-build)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

### Peter Gostev — DOOMQL (Jul 13, 2026)

For show-and-tell, Peter Gostev demoed DOOMQL, a playable Doom-like game built almost entirely in ~2,000 lines of SQL by GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra, essentially in one shot — plus a companion Minecraft clone written in Lean. A live illustration of how far frontier coding models now push into languages nobody writes games in.

**~2,000** lines of SQL

- [Peter Gostev on X](https://x.com/petergostev/status/2076692164310884468)
- [doomql on GitHub](https://github.com/petergpt/doomql)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jul 16 - Inkling 975B open weights, Kimi K3 at 2.8T, a 27B model on a phone & Codex hits 9M](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-16-2026)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in July 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-07), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-07 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in June 2026

> 32 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-06


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K2.7 Code (Jun 18, 2026)

Moonshot AI open-sourced Kimi K2.7 Code, a trillion-parameter MoE coding model with benchmark jumps over K2.6 and fewer reasoning tokens. On the show it landed as the second half of the open-source coding wave beside GLM-5.2.

**1T** MoE parameters · **30%** fewer reasoning tokens

- [Kimi announcement on X](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2065377579130142937)
- [Kimi K2.7 Code on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code)
- [Kimi Code beta](https://kimi.ai/code-beta)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-open-source-uprising)

### xAI — Grok Imagine Video 1.5 (Jun 18, 2026)

xAI launched Grok Imagine Video 1.5 with nearly 2x faster generation, native audio, and a claimed #1 leaderboard position. The episode grouped it with Gemini Omni as part of the week’s video-generation frontier.

**~2x** faster generation

- [xAI announcement on X](https://x.com/xai/status/2067092897951109427)
- [Grok Imagine Video 1.5 blog](https://x.ai/blog/grok-imagine-video-1-5)
- [xAI video generation docs](https://docs.x.ai/docs/guides/video-generation)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-sci-fi-medical)

### Z.ai (Zhipu AI) — GLM-5.2 (Jun 18, 2026)

Z.ai released GLM-5.2 as a major open-source coding and agentic model: a 753B-parameter MoE, MIT-licensed, with a one-million-token context window. The episode treated it as the open-source model that arrived exactly as Fable access disappeared, with strong coding and agentic performance close to the frontier.

**753B** parameters · **1M** context window · **MIT** license

- [Z.ai announcement on X](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2066938937344495629)
- [GLM-5.2 blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2)
- [GLM-5.2 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.2)
- [GLM-5.2 docs](https://docs.z.ai/guides/llm/glm-5.2)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-open-source-uprising)

### Google DeepMind — Gemma 4 12B (Jun 4, 2026)

Google released Gemma 4 12B, an encoder-free multimodal model under Apache 2.0 that targets 16GB VRAM local setups. Instead of bolting separate vision or audio encoders onto a language model, it uses one unified network, which LDJ and Yam argued makes smaller multimodal models cheaper, cleaner, and easier to run locally.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/googlegemma/status/2062202706882883696)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-12b-it)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-google-gemma-4-12b-encoder-free-multimodal)

### H Company — Holo 3.1 (Jun 4, 2026)

H Company released Holo 3.1, a family of local computer-use agent models ranging from 0.8B to 35B parameters with new quantized checkpoints. The lineup targets running screen-driving agents on local hardware rather than in the cloud.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/hcompany_ai/status/2061815355341725925)
- [Blog](https://hcompany.ai/holo3.1)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026)

### Ideogram — Ideogram 4.0 (Jun 4, 2026)

Ideogram released Ideogram 4.0, a 9.3B-parameter text-to-image model with open weights under a non-commercial license. It leads open-weight image models on typography and layout, with bounding-box/layout-style prompting that trades casual generation ease for precise structured control.

**9.3B** Ideogram 4 parameters

- [Blog](https://ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4-0)
- [Hugging Face Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/ideogram-ai/ideogram-4)
- [Hugging Face (FP8)](https://huggingface.co/ideogram-ai/ideogram-4-fp8)
- [X announcement](https://twitter.com/ideogram_ai/status/2062202208700313872)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-ideogram-4-open-weights)

### JetBrains — Mellum 2 (Jun 4, 2026)

JetBrains released Mellum 2, a 12B mixture-of-experts coding model with only 2.5B active parameters, trained from scratch by a small team using a three-stage curriculum over 10T tokens. The panel read it as IDE companies converting years of developer-workflow context into model advantage; it is also available on CoreWeave Inference.

- [Blog](https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/06/mellum2-goes-open-source-a-fast-model-for-ai-workflows/)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/JetBrains/Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Thinking)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/nv_pavlichenko/status/2061438808290172935)
- [CoreWeave Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference/coreweave/cw_JetBrains_Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-jetbrains-mellum-2)

### Microsoft — MAI-Code-1-Flash (Jun 4, 2026)

Part of the seven-model MAI launch at Build 2026, MAI-Code-1-Flash is Microsoft AI's fast coding model and ships directly into GitHub Copilot. The panel saw it as a sign Microsoft intends to serve its own models inside its developer surfaces instead of relying solely on OpenAI.

- [Blog](https://microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/)
- [Technical Report](https://microsoft.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/main_20260602_2.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-microsoft-mai-thinking-and-code-models)

### Microsoft — MAI-Thinking-1 (Jun 4, 2026)

Microsoft AI used Build 2026 to launch seven MAI models, headlined by MAI-Thinking-1, a 1T total, 35B active MoE reasoning model trained from scratch on 33T tokens without distillation. The panel read the launch as Microsoft becoming a frontier model lab in its own right rather than only an OpenAI distribution channel.

**1T** MAI Thinking 1 total parameters · **33T** MAI training tokens

- [Blog](https://microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/)
- [Technical Report](https://microsoft.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/main_20260602_2.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-microsoft-mai-thinking-and-code-models)

### MiniMax — MiniMax M3 (Jun 4, 2026)

MiniMax announced M3, a natively multimodal coding and agentic model with a one-million-token sparse attention context claim and open weights promised soon. Reported numbers include 59 on SWE-bench Pro, and the panel noted MiniMax already has a following for cheap agentic tool calling even as pure coding quality is debated.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2061266317815296322)
- [API](https://platform.minimax.io)
- [MiniMax Code](https://code.minimax.io)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-minimax-m3)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3.5 ASR (Jun 4, 2026)

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 ASR, a 600M-parameter open multilingual streaming speech-to-text model aimed at voice agents. It supports 40 languages and reportedly delivers 17x more throughput than Parakeet-style baselines at half the size, pushing the latency/accuracy frontier for open voice-agent infrastructure.

**17x** Nemotron ASR throughput

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/nemotron-3.5-asr-streaming-0.6b)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/kwindla/status/2062544580105359686)
- [STT Benchmark](https://github.com/pipecat-ai/stt-benchmark)
- [Voice Agent Repo](https://github.com/kwindla/nemotron-voice-agent)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-nvidia-nemotron-3-5-asr)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3 Ultra (Jun 4, 2026)

NVIDIA dropped Nemotron 3 Ultra the day of the show, a 550B-parameter sparse MoE with 55B active parameters built for long-running agentic harnesses like OpenCode, Hermes, and OpenClaw. Chris Alexiuk joined to explain the hybrid Mamba/Transformer architecture and the unusually complete open release: weights, training data, recipes, a GenRM reward model, and an NVFP4 quantized checkpoint.

**550B** Nemotron 3 Ultra parameters · **55B** Active parameters

- [Announcement](https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/)
- [Technical Report](https://research.nvidia.com/labs/nemotron/files/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Ultra-Technical-Report.pdf)
- [Hugging Face (post-trained BF16)](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B-A55B-BF16)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/NVIDIAAI/status/2062521325076299981)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-interview-chris-alexiuk-nvidia-nemotron-3-ultra)

### Reve — Reve 2.0 (Jun 4, 2026)

Reve 2.0 jumped to second place on Text-to-Image Arena (around 1200 ELO) with native 4K output, code-like layout control, and precise editing. Alex's live tests found inconsistent portrait identity, but the layout-first editor is the real differentiator for graphic and image iteration workflows.

- [Blog (The Layout Bet)](https://blog.reve.com/posts/the-layout-bet/)
- [Try it](https://app.reve.com/)
- [X announcement](https://twitter.com/reve/status/2062260665121919101)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-reve-v2-layout-based-image-model)

### xAI — Grok Imagine Video 1.5 Preview (Jun 4, 2026)

xAI released a preview of Grok Imagine Video 1.5, an image-to-video model that generates clips with synchronized audio. It adds xAI to the week's crowded race of media-generation model updates.

- [xAI announcement](https://x.ai/news/grok-imagine-1-5)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026)

## Products & Apps

### Weights & Biases — Aria (Jun 29, 2026)

Aria went generally available on Monday — an auto-research agent living in the W&B UI ('Just Ask Aria') that reads your traces and debugs your loss curves. In Zubin Aysola's AI Engineer talk, Aria read its own production traces and updated its own prompts.

- [Weights & Biases](https://wandb.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - July 2 - LIVE from AI Engineer World's Fair 🎪 Fable is back, GPT-5.6, local.ai, 9 guests & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-02-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz-aria)

### OpenAI — Jalapeno (Jun 25, 2026)

OpenAI unveiled Jalapeno, its first custom inference ASIC built with Broadcom, positioning it as part of a full-stack strategy to make ChatGPT, Codex, API, and agent workloads cheaper and faster at scale.

**9 months** claimed design to tape-out · **50%** inference cost reduction claim · **1.3GW** planned deployment scale

- [OpenAI Jalapeno announcement](https://openai.com/index/jalapeno/)
- [OpenAI Jalapeno tweet](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2069770172802773292)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - June 25 - GLM 5.2 total victory, Sakana FUGU, OpenAI Jalapeno chips & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-25-2026#sec-claude-tag-openai-jalapeno)

### Midjourney — Midjourney Medical scanner (Jun 18, 2026)

Midjourney announced Midjourney Medical, a full-body ultrasound scanner concept that the episode described as capturing 806TB per scan in under 60 seconds. The panel treated it as a striking sign that AI-native companies are moving beyond chatbots into hardware, imaging, and healthcare infrastructure.

**806TB** scan payload · **<60s** scan time

- [Alex Volkov coverage on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/2067424497561670128)
- [Nick St. Pierre coverage on X](https://x.com/nickfloats/status/2067423587540123853)
- [Midjourney scanner announcement](https://midjourney.com/scanner)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-sci-fi-medical)

### Cognition Labs — Devin Desktop (Jun 4, 2026)

Cognition rebranded Windsurf into Devin Desktop, a multi-agent command center with Agent Client Protocol (ACP) support. The move consolidates Cognition's IDE acquisition into its Devin agent brand as a desktop control surface for running multiple coding agents.

- [Announcement](https://devin.ai/desktop)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/cognition/status/2061889596703551926)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026)

### Nous Research — Hermes Desktop (Jun 4, 2026)

Nous Research launched Hermes Desktop, packaging the Hermes Agent harness into a native desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Karan previewed chat, permissions, tool-call visibility, reasoning traces, and admin controls aimed at small teams, startups, and personal agent fleets.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2061843507417944552)
- [Site](https://hermes.nousresearch.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-hermes-desktop)

### NVIDIA — RTX Spark (Jun 4, 2026)

At Computex, NVIDIA unveiled RTX Spark, an Arm CPU plus Blackwell GPU PC platform with 128GB unified memory targeting local AI agents and 120B-class local inference. A wave of thin laptops with RTX 5070-class GPUs and roughly one petaflop of local AI compute raises the question of what agents should run locally versus in the cloud.

- [Coverage (Tom's Hardware)](https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/nvidia-unveils-rtx-spark-superchip-at-computex-2026-new-platform-promises-to-turn-windows-into-an-agentic-ai-os-with-arm-cpu-blackwell-gpu-and-128gb-unified-memory)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-nvidia-rtx-spark-and-computex-laptops)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — Codex Computer Use in Europe (Jun 18, 2026)

OpenAI rolled out Codex Computer Use plus Chrome extension, Memory, and Chronicle access to users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. The episode covered it as part of the week’s coding-agent platform expansion.

- [OpenAI Developers announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2066916479438930166)
- [Codex changelog](https://developers.openai.com/codex/changelog)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-cursor-hivemind-agents)

### WolfBench (Wolfram Ravenwolf) — WolfBench Token-Usage Visualization (Jun 4, 2026)

Wolfram Ravenwolf shipped a WolfBench feature that visualizes token usage alongside benchmark score as 3D token-depth bars. Two models can look close on a leaderboard while one burns dramatically more tokens, which changes the real cost and latency story; Gemini 3.5 Flash and GPT 5.5 were compared as examples.

- [wolfbench.ai](https://wolfbench.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-wolfbench-token-usage-visualization)

## APIs & Platforms

### OpenRouter — Fusion API (Jun 18, 2026)

OpenRouter launched Fusion API, which routes or ensembles a panel of lower-cost models to reach near-frontier results. The episode notes framed it as beating GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 in some comparisons while landing within roughly 1% of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.

**~1%** from Fable 5 in episode notes

- [OpenRouter announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenRouter/status/2065856853989270011)
- [Fusion beats frontier models](https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/fusion-beats-frontier/)
- [OpenRouter Fusion](https://openrouter.ai/fusion)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-cursor-hivemind-agents)

### Weights & Biases / CoreWeave — Kimi K2.7 Code on CoreWeave Inference (Jun 18, 2026)

Kimi K2.7 Code became available on W&B/CoreWeave Inference, with the episode notes calling out Blackwell NVFP4 serving, speculative decoding, and 289 tokens per second near the top of Artificial Analysis speed and price-performance charts.

**289 tok/s** reported throughput

- [CoreWeave announcement](https://x.com/CoreWeave/status/2067613387056709982)
- [Try Kimi K2.7 Code on W&B/CoreWeave Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference/coreweave/cw_moonshotai_Kimi-K2.7-Code)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-open-source-uprising)

## Dev Tools

### Anthropic — Claude Tag (Jun 25, 2026)

Claude Tag brings Claude into Slack as a persistent proactive teammate with shared channel context, ambient follow-up, coding tasks, analysis, incident support, and enterprise governance.

**65%** Anthropic product-team code from internal version · **$25K** Enterprise launch credits

- [Claude Tag launch](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2069468693017268244)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - June 25 - GLM 5.2 total victory, Sakana FUGU, OpenAI Jalapeno chips & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-25-2026#sec-claude-tag-openai-jalapeno)

### Linzumi — Linzumi (Jun 25, 2026)

YC-backed Linzumi launched a team chat and agent orchestration environment where humans and AI coding agents share threads, with Sean Grove describing a future of 10,000 agent hours per person per day.

**10,000** agent hours / person / day · **$100** flat monthly team tier

- [YC Linzumi launch](https://x.com/ycombinator/status/2069465556433211583)
- [Linzumi](https://linzumi.com)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - June 25 - GLM 5.2 total victory, Sakana FUGU, OpenAI Jalapeno chips & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-25-2026#sec-sean-grove-linzumi)

### Sakana AI — Fugu (Jun 25, 2026)

Announced on air by Stefania Druga: the Fugu recursive router — it rewrites prompts and verifies outputs before picking a model, per the two ICLR papers behind it (Trinity and the conductor) — now plugs into Codex and OpenCode.

**95.5** GPQA Diamond · **93.2** LiveCodeBench · **73.7** SWE-Bench Pro

- [Fugu announcement](https://sakana.ai/fugu/)
- [Sakana launch tweet](https://x.com/SakanaAILabs/status/2068861630327443966)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - June 25 - GLM 5.2 total victory, Sakana FUGU, OpenAI Jalapeno chips & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-25-2026#sec-sakana-fugu-orchestration)

### HumanLayer — Agentic IDE (Jun 18, 2026)

HumanLayer launched its Agentic IDE, positioned as a human-in-the-loop answer to lights-out coding-agent slop. Dexter Horthy joined the show to argue that the right architecture keeps humans steering high-impact changes instead of letting agents silently trash production codebases.

- [Dexter Horthy announcement on X](https://x.com/dexhorthy/status/2067286892786454855)
- [HumanLayer](https://humanlayer.dev)
- [12-Factor Agents](https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-cursor-hivemind-agents)

### Weights & Biases — HiveMind (Jun 18, 2026)

Weights & Biases launched HiveMind, a dashboard for tracking AI coding-agent sessions, spend, transcripts, ROI, and reusable organizational learning. Chris Van Pelt and Adrian Swanberg joined the show to explain why teams need observability for their growing fleet of coding agents.

- [W&B announcement on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/2067353722825625961)
- [HiveMind](https://hivemind.wandb.tools)
- [HiveMind on GitHub](https://github.com/wandb/hivemind)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-cursor-hivemind-agents)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Arena (LMArena) — Agent Arena (Jun 4, 2026)

Arena (LMArena) launched Agent Arena during the episode, moving beyond one-turn chatbot preference battles to evaluate models on real agent workflows with web search, files, terminals, user corrections, and objective recovery signals. Peter Gostev joined live to explain why long-running, harder tasks need a different benchmark.

- [Agent Arena announcement](https://news.lmarena.ai/agent-arena/)
- [Arena](https://arena.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Jun 4 - NVIDIA drops Nemotron 3 Ultra (550B open), Microsoft becomes a frontier lab, Ideogram 4 goes open, Agent Arena & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-04-2026#sec-agent-arena-from-lmarena)

## Acquisitions

### Cursor — Cursor acquisition (Jun 18, 2026)

The show covered a reported $60B all-stock acquisition of Anysphere/Cursor by SpaceX/xAI. Alex framed it as coding assistants becoming strategic infrastructure: workflows, agent traces, and developer context are now assets frontier labs want to own.

**$60B** reported acquisition price

- [Trending coverage on X](https://x.com/i/trending/2066835075900289100)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-cursor-hivemind-agents)

## Also Released

### Anthropic — Claude Fable/Mythos access restriction (Jun 18, 2026)

Anthropic reportedly shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 access for foreign nationals, then disabled both models broadly to comply. The episode framed it as the first major direct government intervention in frontier model access, turning model availability into a national-security and sovereign-AI story.

- [Anthropic statement on X](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2065597531644743999)
- [Anthropic statement](https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access)
- Podcast coverage: [Fable Got Banned, Open Source Stormed the Castle](https://thursdai.news/ep/jun-18-2026#sec-fable-ban)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in June 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-06), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-06 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in May 2026

> 44 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-05


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026)

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 during the episode, hitting 69.2% on SWE-bench Pro (up from 64.3% on 4.7 and ahead of GPT-5.5 at 58.6%), a new-best 57.9% on Humanity's Last Exam with tools, and 83.4% on OSWorld-Verified. It also shows a real long-context jump past the usual 200K cliff (85.9% GraphWalks BFS at 256K), with new thinking modes in the UI. Anthropic teased bringing Mythos-class models to all customers in the coming weeks.

**69.2%** SWE-bench Pro

- [Claude Opus 4.8 — blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8)
- [Claude Opus 4.8 — system card](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-4-8-system-card)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### Cartesia — Ink-2 (May 28, 2026)

Cartesia released Ink-2, which debuted as the most accurate streaming speech-to-text model with the fastest turnaround on Artificial Analysis's new STT leaderboard. It landed just after recording as part of a double post-show voice-AI drop alongside ElevenLabs Dubbing v2.

- [Cartesia Ink-2](https://www.cartesia.ai/ink)
- [Cartesia announcement](https://x.com/cartesia/status/2060041155216355376)
- [Artificial Analysis STT leaderboard](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2060021901234458958)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### ElevenLabs — Dubbing v2 (May 28, 2026)

ElevenLabs launched Dubbing v2, an audio-to-audio dubbing model that translates voices across more than 90 languages while preserving cadence, expression, intonation, and even stutters. Alex's live demos, including dubbing Nisten into Hebrew and his own voice into multiple languages, were the brain-melting moment of the episode.

- [ElevenLabs Dubbing v2](https://elevenlabs.io/dubbing)
- [ElevenLabs announcement](https://x.com/ElevenLabs/status/2060024691444617418)
- [ElevenLabs Creative](https://elevenlabs.io/creative)
- [ElevenLabs Productions](https://elevenlabs.io/productions)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### Microsoft — MAI-Image-2.5 (May 28, 2026)

MAI-Image-2.5 jumped to number two on Arena's image-to-image leaderboard shortly after launch, with notable strength in image cleanup, backgrounds, documents, and diagrams. Hands-on tests on the show were mixed, and it is publicly accessible through playground.microsoft.ai.

- [Microsoft MAI Image 2.5 — Arena](https://x.com/arena/status/2059346024632820146)
- [Microsoft AI announcement](https://x.com/MicrosoftAI/status/2059344061358563838)
- [MAI-Image-2.5 announcement image](https://microsoft.ai/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MAI-Blog-MAIN-Foundry-1.jpg)
- [X announcement](https://twitter.com/MicrosoftAI/status/2062240400299934143)
- [Try it (Microsoft Playground)](https://playground.microsoft.ai/?model=mai-image-2-5)
- [Blog](https://microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### OpenBMB — MiniCPM5-1B (May 28, 2026)

OpenBMB released MiniCPM5-1B, a state-of-the-art 1B-parameter open-weights model for efficient local and on-device use that runs on a phone. It scores 17.9 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, 7.4 points ahead of its size class, while using roughly 31x fewer output tokens than Qwen3.5 2B.

**17.9** AAII (1B model)

- [OpenBMB MiniCPM5-1B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B)
- [MiniCPM5-1B paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07900)
- [Artificial Analysis on MiniCPM5-1B](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2059411573907808487)
- [OpenBMB announcement](https://x.com/OpenBMB/status/2059637602756841739)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### OpenMOSS — MOSS-TTS-v1.5 (May 28, 2026)

OpenMOSS shipped MOSS-TTS-v1.5, an 8B open-source text-to-speech model supporting 31 languages with pause control, released under Apache 2.0. It is one of the larger fully open TTS models available.

- [MOSS-TTS-v1.5 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-TTS-v1.5)
- [MOSS-TTS GitHub](https://github.com/OpenMOSS/MOSS-TTS)
- [MOSS-TTS paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18090)
- [MOSS announcement](https://x.com/MosiAI_Official/status/2059311099216793721)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### PrismML — Bonsai Image 4B (May 28, 2026)

PrismML released 1-bit and ternary versions of Bonsai Image 4B, a sub-1GB diffusion transformer for local image generation. The quantized model even runs in-browser via WebGPU and ships with an iOS app and a Hugging Face demo.

- [PrismML Bonsai Image 4B — blog](https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-image-4b)
- [PrismML Bonsai on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/prism-ml/bonsai-image)
- [Bonsai Image demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/prism-ml/Bonsai-Image-Demo)
- [Bonsai Studio iOS app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bonsai-studio-by-prismml/id6767042620)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### Pruna AI — P-Image-Upscale (May 28, 2026)

Pruna AI released P-Image-Upscale, an image upscaling model that reaches 128 megapixel outputs with fast generation and predictable pricing. It is available through Pruna's API and on Replicate.

- [Pruna P-Image-Upscale on Replicate](https://replicate.com/prunaai/p-image-upscale)
- [P-Image-Upscale docs](https://docs.api.pruna.ai/guides/models/p-image-upscale)
- [Pruna announcement](https://x.com/PrunaAI/status/2059288498876617096)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### Tencent — Hy-MT2 (May 28, 2026)

Tencent released the Hy-MT2 family of translation models under Apache 2.0, including a tiny 1.8B model that beats paid translation APIs like Microsoft's Translator, plus a larger 30B-A3B MoE variant. A small, free, locally-runnable model outperforming commercial translation services was one of the open-source wins of the week.

- [Tencent Hy-MT2 1.8B](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy-MT2-1.8B)
- [Tencent Hy-MT2 30B-A3B](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hy-MT2-30B-A3B)
- [Hy-MT2 paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.22064)
- [Tencent Hunyuan announcement](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2059249996256711150)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 3.7-Max (May 21, 2026)

Alibaba released Qwen 3.7-Max, an agentic frontier model built for long autonomous runs, demonstrated alongside robotics demos. It continues the Qwen Max line as Alibaba's closed frontier offering aimed at agentic workloads.

- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog/qwen3.7-max)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/xiong_hui_chen/status/2056936165450842593)
- [Robot demo](https://x.com/xiong_hui_chen/status/2057190290658906207)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### Cohere — Command A+ (May 21, 2026)

Cohere released Command A+, a 218B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 25B active parameters, shipping open weights under Apache 2.0. It was the week's headline open-source release, available on Hugging Face in both W4A4 quantized and BF16 variants.

**218B** Command A+ parameters · **25B** active parameters

- [Cohere blog](https://cohere.com/blog/command-a-plus)
- [Nick Frosst](https://x.com/nickfrosst/status/2057133957502660785)
- [HF W4A4](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-w4a4)
- [HF BF16](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/command-a-plus-05-2026-bf16)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### Cursor — Composer 2.5 (May 21, 2026)

Cursor launched Composer 2.5, a coding model continued-trained on top of Kimi K2.5 (with permission) that delivers Opus-class coding performance at much lower cost. The crew noted Cursor is 'absolutely back' with strong pre-training and post-training teams, and that training now runs partly on the Colossus supercomputer.

- [Cursor blog](https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2-5)
- [Cursor on X](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2056415413077233983)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-cursor-composer-2-5)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.5 Flash (May 21, 2026)

Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026 as a fast, determined workhorse model built for agentic loops rather than a budget-tier Flash like prior generations. It is rolling out across the Gemini app, Search AI Mode, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Antigravity and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Nisten noted unusual determinism in its behavior, and Logan Kilpatrick framed it as designed for the agentic era.

**900M** Gemini app users

- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement](https://x.com/officiallogank/status/2056792266514329914)
- [Noam Shazeer](https://x.com/noamshazeer/status/2056795646116720871)
- [Jeff Dean](https://x.com/jeffdean/status/2056793419033588091)
- [Koray Kavukcuoglu on rollout](https://x.com/koraykv/status/2056795669156020583)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-gemini-3-5-flash-discussion)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini Omni (May 21, 2026)

Google DeepMind launched Gemini Omni, a multimodal 'create anything from anything' model debuting as Google's first conversational video editor. Unlike pure text-to-video systems, Omni is an iterative multi-turn editing model that combines Gemini intelligence, world knowledge, multimodal inputs and generative media, in the same way Nano Banana brought Gemini to interactive image editing. It is available in the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube, with API support coming soon.

- [DeepMind model page](https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-omni/)
- [Google DeepMind on X](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2056786446636212467)
- [Logan on availability](https://x.com/officiallogank/status/2056787874260164628)
- [Gemini App](https://x.com/geminiapp/status/2056800579159216202)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-google-gemini-omni-multimodal-ai)

### Fastino Labs — GLiGuard (May 14, 2026)

Fastino Labs released GLiGuard, a 300M-parameter open source guardrail model that matches state-of-the-art safety models 23-90x its size while delivering 16x higher throughput. It ships under Apache 2.0, making small, fast, deployable guardrails available to everyone.

**300M** parameters

- [X announcement](https://x.com/ash_csx/status/2053886668017447148)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/fastino-ai/GLiGuard)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-open-source-ai-supply-chain-attack)

### Krea AI — Krea 2 (May 14, 2026)

Krea released Krea 2, its first foundation image model trained from scratch, built over six to seven months by nearly half the company. It focuses on aesthetic diversity, style control with up to 4 reference images, and moodboard-driven workflows, generating images in roughly 15 seconds. Co-founder and CEO Victor Perez joined the show to walk through it.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/krea_ai/status/2054207481421975829)
- [Blog](https://krea.ai/krea-2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-krea-2-model-mood-boards)

### Meta AI — Sapiens2 (May 14, 2026)

Meta released Sapiens2, a family of six ViT models ranging from 0.1B to 5B parameters trained on 1 billion human images. The models set SOTA on human-centric vision tasks including pose estimation, segmentation, surface normals, and pointmaps, with weights on Hugging Face.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/mervenoyann/status/2054187884417102319)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/facebook/sapiens2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-open-source-ai-supply-chain-attack)

### Perceptron AI — Perceptron Mk1 (May 14, 2026)

Perceptron released Mk1, a frontier video and embodied reasoning model priced at roughly a tenth of comparable models. It scores 88.5 on VSI-Bench and 72.4 on RefSpatialBench (versus 9.0 for GPT-5m on the latter) and is live on OpenRouter.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/perceptroninc/status/2054216828285796630)
- [Site](https://perceptron.inc)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026)

### Thinking Machines Lab — Interaction Models (May 14, 2026)

Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released Interaction Models, a 276B-parameter MoE (12B active) trained from scratch for native real-time multimodal collaboration. It supports full-duplex audio/video/text with 0.40s turn-taking latency and scores 77.8 on FD-bench v1.5. The demo can react live to events like another person entering the camera frame.

**276B** MoE parameters · **12B** active parameters

- [X announcement](https://x.com/miramurati/status/2053939069890298321)
- [Blog](https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/interaction-models)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-thinking-machines-interaction-models)

## Products & Apps

### Google — Universal Cart / AP2 / UCP (May 28, 2026)

Google launched Universal Cart along with the AP2 and UCP protocols, infrastructure that lets AI agents shop and pay on a user's behalf. It is Google's play to standardize agent-driven commerce across merchants and payment flows.

- [Google Universal Cart / AP2 / UCP](https://x.com/Google/status/2059673635967701068)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### Runway — Project Luxo (May 28, 2026)

Runway launched Project Luxo, claiming AI-generated video has crossed the uncanny valley for solo-creator short films. The pitch is that a single creator can now produce watchable short-form films end to end with Runway's stack.

- [Runway Project Luxo — blog](https://runwayml.com/blog/project-luxo)
- [Runway announcement](https://x.com/runwayml/status/2059279505009615293)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### Google — Antigravity 2.0 (May 21, 2026)

Antigravity 2.0 was positioned at I/O 2026 as the single agent harness powering agentic experiences across Google, from internal tooling to Search, Workspace and developer products. Born from the Windsurf acquisition, it evolved from an agent-first IDE into the through line for Google's agentic strategy, now exposed to external developers as well.

- [Sundar Pichai announcement](https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2056796896195469476)
- [Google OS demo](https://x.com/google/status/2056789235500466273)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-antigravity-agentic-coding-at-google)

### Google — Gemini Spark (May 21, 2026)

Google announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that can proactively work across Google surfaces, framed on the show as Google's OpenClaw competitor. Access was not yet broadly available at announcement time, so the crew discussed it from the announcement rather than hands-on testing.

- [News from Google](https://x.com/newsfromgoogle/status/2056862792691728546)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-google-spark-agentic-agents)

### CoreWeave — CoreWeave Sandboxes (May 14, 2026)

CoreWeave Sandboxes is now an official Harbor provider, letting teams run agentic workloads like Terminal-Bench safely at scale on CoreWeave infrastructure. It plugs CoreWeave's isolated execution environments directly into the Harbor eval/agent ecosystem.

- [Docs](https://docs.wandb.ai/sandboxes)
- [CoreWeave blog](https://www.coreweave.com/blog/run-agentic-workloads-safely-at-scale-with-coreweave-sandboxes?utm_campaign=44330374-CoreWeave%20Sandbox%20Launch&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_term=corporate%20blog%20social)
- [CoreWeave Sandboxes](https://coreweave-6366d7.webflow.io/blog/run-agentic-workloads-safely-at-scale-with-coreweave-sandboxes)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-this-week-s-buzz-coreweave-sandboxes)

### OpenAI — Daybreak (May 14, 2026)

OpenAI announced Daybreak, a frontier AI cybersecurity platform that pairs GPT-5.5 with Codex for security workloads. It launches with partners including Cloudflare, positioning OpenAI directly in the AI-powered defense market.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2053939702110269822)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code (May 28, 2026)

Alongside Opus 4.8, Anthropic shipped Dynamic Workflows and an Ultra Code mode in Claude Code, which Yam fired up live on the show. The headline proof point: Bun was ported from Zig to Rust — about 750K lines — via Dynamic Workflows, with 99.8% of the test suite passing and the port merged in 11 days.

**750K lines** Bun: Zig → Rust

- [Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code](https://claude.com/blog/introducing-dynamic-workflows-in-claude-code)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026)

### Google — AI Studio native Android apps (May 28, 2026)

Google AI Studio now lets anyone build native Android apps for free, with 250,000 apps created in the first week. The crew framed it as another step toward personalized, disposable software that anyone can vibe-code on demand.

- [Google AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com)
- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2058997700218294564)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### Anthropic — Claude off-peak usage boost (May 21, 2026)

Anthropic doubled Claude usage outside peak hours for a limited period, covering Claude Code and other Claude surfaces. The move gives heavy users substantially more agentic and coding throughput during off-peak windows.

- [Claude on X](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2032911276226257206)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### Google — Google Search agentic capabilities (May 21, 2026)

Google Search is getting new Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered agentic capabilities, including a new AI-powered Search box and background information agents. The crew framed the rollout as a massive intelligence uplift across one of Google's largest surfaces, with billions of Search users getting frontier-model capabilities.

**3.5B** Google Search users

- [Sundar Pichai on Search agents](https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2056796905301299288)
- [Alex's I/O thread](https://x.com/altryne/status/2056793526755840187)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### OpenAI — Codex Mobile (May 21, 2026)

OpenAI's Codex Mobile is now available in the ChatGPT mobile apps, enabling remote agent workflows from a phone. The crew discussed it as part of the broader shift toward driving coding agents from anywhere rather than just the desktop.

- [OpenAI on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2055016850849993072)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-openai-codex-mobile-agent-workflows)

### Anthropic — Claude Agent SDK monthly credits (May 14, 2026)

Anthropic announced separate monthly Claude Agent SDK credits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, starting June 15, 2026. This gives agent builders a dedicated usage pool on top of regular plan limits.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026)

### Meta AI — Muse Spark voice conversations (May 14, 2026)

Meta rolled out Muse Spark-powered voice conversations across the Meta AI app, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The feature includes real-time image generation, live camera AI, and instant Reels/maps integration. Alex tested it live and called it surprisingly good, the first big consumer ship from Meta Superintelligence Labs.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MetaNewsroom/status/2054205287515484397)
- [Announcement](https://ai.meta.com/blog/muse-spark/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-meta-muse-spark-voice-ai)

### OpenAI (Codex), Anthropic, Nous Research — /goal command (May 14, 2026)

The /goal command is now available in Codex, Claude Code, and Hermes, productizing the Ralph loop pattern: set a measurable success condition and the agent iterates autonomously until it is done. Codex's implementation is winning early head-to-head comparisons over Claude Code, and the show framed it as turning coding agents into 24/7 AI employees.

- [X thread](https://x.com/aiedge_/status/2054569766418108797)
- [Codex docs: follow goals](https://developers.openai.com/codex/use-cases/follow-goals)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-agentic-engineering-goal-hermes)

## APIs & Platforms

### Google DeepMind — Managed Agents (Gemini API) (May 21, 2026)

Google launched Managed Agents in the Gemini API, letting developers spin up hosted Antigravity agents with Linux sandboxes and persistent state. It ships alongside the next-generation Interactions API, which Logan Kilpatrick described as designed for agentic systems rather than the old tokens-in, tokens-out model interaction pattern.

- [Gemini API agents docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/agents)
- [Google AI Developers on X](https://x.com/googleaidevs/status/2056863867142373739)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-managed-agents-interactions-api)

## Dev Tools

### Cua — Cua Driver for Windows (May 28, 2026)

Cua launched Windows support for Cua Driver, enabling background computer-use agents that operate real desktop apps without taking over the user's screen. It extends Cua's open-source computer-use stack to the largest desktop OS.

- [Cua Driver Windows — blog](https://github.com/trycua/cua/blob/main/blog/inside-windows-computer-use.md)
- [Cua GitHub](https://github.com/trycua/cua)
- [Cua announcement](https://x.com/trycua/status/2059688960838828391)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-tldr-roundup)

### Weights & Biases — W&B MCP Server (May 28, 2026)

W&B officially launched its MCP server with 20 schema-first tools so coding agents can read experiments, monitor training, and run autonomous research loops. Agents can query metadata before pulling full 300-metric runs, keeping their context windows from blowing up.

- [W&B MCP Server](https://wandb.ai/site/mcp)
- [W&B MCP Server — blog](https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/mcp/reports/Introducing-the-W-B-MCP-Server--VmlldzoxMjI2NTkxOA)
- [W&B announcement](https://x.com/wandb/status/2059384552725025226)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

### xAI — Grok Build (May 21, 2026)

xAI launched Grok Build, an agentic CLI coding tool, in beta for SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. It joins the crowded field of terminal-based coding agents as xAI's entry into agentic engineering tooling.

- [xAI CLI page](https://x.ai/cli)
- [xAI on X](https://x.com/xai/status/2054993285152989373)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### Nous Research — Hermes CLI agent (May 14, 2026)

Nous Research's Hermes overtook OpenClaw as the #1 CLI agent on OpenRouter. It also added background computer use via Trykua, and Alex described switching his own daily agent workflow from OpenClaw to Hermes.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Teknium/status/2053961675985113404)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-agentic-engineering-goal-hermes)

## Papers & Research

### Nous Research — Lighthouse Attention (May 21, 2026)

Nous Research released Lighthouse Attention, a sparse attention method for long-context pretraining that delivers major speedups. The release includes a blog post, an arXiv paper and an open-source GitHub implementation.

- [Blog](https://nousresearch.com/lighthouse-attention)
- [Nous Research on X](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2055337939270332862)
- [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06554)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/ighoshsubho/lighthouse-attention)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-ai-news-roundup)

### OpenAI — Erdős planar unit distance result (May 21, 2026)

OpenAI announced that a general-purpose reasoning model made progress on the Erdős planar unit distance problem, challenging an 80-year-old mathematical belief. The panel called it the most important news of the week outside Google I/O, as a sign that frontier reasoning models are starting to contribute to genuinely open mathematics.

**80-year** Erdos math problem

- [OpenAI blog post](https://openai.com/index/planar-unit-distance-problem/)
- [OpenAI on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2057176201782075690)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-openai-solves-erd-s-math-problem)

### Nous Research — TST (Token Superposition Training) (May 14, 2026)

Nous Research released Token Superposition Training (TST), a training technique that achieves 2-3x wall-clock speedup at matched FLOPs. It requires no architecture changes, making it a drop-in efficiency win for LLM training runs.

- [X announcement](https://twitter.com/NousResearch/status/2054610062836892054)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-open-source-ai-supply-chain-attack)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Datacurve — DeepSWE (May 28, 2026)

DeepSWE is a coding leaderboard built from 113 original tasks written from scratch and shipped as shallow clones with no git history to cheat from. GPT-5.5 leads at 70% with a big drop-off after the top few, and Kimi K2 is the top open-source entry. Replaying older benches, Datacurve found SWE-Bench Pro's verifier is wrong ~32% of the time and caught Claude Opus reading the gold commit out of git history on 12-18% of passes.

**70%** DeepSWE leader (GPT-5.5)

- [DeepSWE benchmark](https://deepswe.datacurve.ai)
- [DeepSWE blog](https://datacurve.ai/research/deepswe)
- [DeepSWE GitHub](https://github.com/datacurve-ai/DeepSWE)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 May 28 - Opus 4.8 ships mid-show, the Pope writes 42K words on AI, 11labs dubs the world and DeepSwe breaks coding evals](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-28-2026#sec-deepswe)

### Artificial Analysis — Coding Agent Index (May 14, 2026)

Artificial Analysis launched the Coding Agent Index, a benchmark that evaluates model and harness combinations rather than models alone. Opus 4.7 in Cursor CLI leads at 61, GLM-5.1 tops the open-weight entries at 53, and costs vary 30x across combos for similar capability.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2053865095076438427)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-14-2026#sec-agentic-engineering-goal-hermes)

## Also Released

### Anthropic — Colossus compute deal (May 21, 2026)

The SpaceX IPO filing revealed Anthropic is paying $1.25 billion per month for AI compute at the Memphis Colossus facility. The crew called it a bombastic deal that lets Anthropic serve far more inference at scale and feel less compute-constrained.

**$1.25B** monthly AI compute spend

- [Axios](https://x.com/axios/status/2057212951707144481)
- [Sawyer Merritt](https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2057231429893853652)
- Podcast coverage: [AI just cracked an 80-year-old math problem nobody could solve — plus everything from Google I/O 26](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-21-2026#sec-anthropic-xai-colossus-infrastructure)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in May 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-05), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-05 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in April 2026

> 86 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-04


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Baidu — ERNIE 5.1 Preview (Apr 30, 2026)

Baidu's ERNIE 5.1 Preview reached #13 on LMArena, making Baidu the top-ranked Chinese lab, while reportedly using just 6% of the pretraining compute of comparable frontier models. The model is available at ernie.baidu.com.

- [ernie.baidu.com](https://ernie.baidu.com)
- [ERNIE for Devs on X](https://x.com/ErnieforDevs/status/2049516018557706650)
- [Arena announcement](https://x.com/arena/status/2049522953793274197)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V4 (Apr 30, 2026)

DeepSeek released the V4 paper and models (V4-Pro and V4-Flash on Hugging Face), a 1.6T-parameter MoE featuring CSA+HCA attention that fits 1M tokens of context in just 5.7GB of KV cache. It is possibly the first frontier model trained across multiple datacenters, and DeepSeek is offering API tokens at an 80% discount on already much cheaper pricing.

**1M** context window · **5.7GB** KV cache at 1M context

- [DeepSeek announcement on X](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/2047516922263285776)
- [Arxiv paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09343)
- [DeepSeek-V4-Pro on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro)
- [DeepSeek-V4-Flash on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-open-source-deepseek-v4)

### IBM — Granite 4.1 (Apr 30, 2026)

IBM released the Granite 4.1 family (3B/8B/30B), dense non-thinking models under Apache 2.0 with best-in-class tool calling, scoring 73 on BFCL with just 8B parameters. IBM claims 20x token efficiency over Qwen3.5 9B, and the models are live on W&B Inference at $0.05/$0.10 per million input/output tokens with 128K context.

- [IBM Granite blog](https://www.ibm.com/granite)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite)
- [W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Apr30)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-open-source-ibm-granite-4-1)

### Mayo Clinic — REDMOD (Apr 30, 2026)

Mayo Clinic published a landmark validation study of REDMOD, an AI model that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to 3 years before clinical diagnosis. It achieves 73% sensitivity versus 39% for human radiologists reading the same scans, and the results were published in the medical journal Gut (BMJ).

**3 years** earlier detection before clinical diagnosis · **73%** REDMOD sensitivity · **39%** radiologist sensitivity on same scans

- [Mayo Clinic announcement](https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-ai-detects-pancreatic-cancer-up-to-3-years-before-diagnosis-in-landmark-validation-study/)
- [Study in Gut (BMJ)](https://gut.bmj.com/content/early/2026/04/22/gutjnl-2025-337266)
- [Mayo Clinic on X](https://x.com/MayoClinic/status/2049536242929590709)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-mayo-clinic-ai-detects-pancreatic-cancer)

### Mistral AI — Mistral Medium 3.5 (Apr 30, 2026)

Mistral launched Medium 3.5, a 128B dense flagship model with 256K context and configurable reasoning, released with weights on Hugging Face. Alongside it Mistral shipped a Vibe coding agent.

- [Mistral blog](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-medium-3-5)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Medium-3.5-128B)
- [Mistral Vibe on X](https://x.com/mistralvibe/status/2049511752379813968)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3 Nano Omni (Apr 30, 2026)

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Nano Omni, a 30B-total/3B-active hybrid Transformer-Mamba MoE with 256K context. It delivers 9x throughput on consumer hardware.

- [NVIDIA blog](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nemotron-3-nano-omni/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### SenseTime — SenseNova U1 (Apr 30, 2026)

SenseTime open-sourced SenseNova U1, a unified multimodal MoE model with 8B total and 3B active parameters that handles understanding and generation with no separate encoder or VAE. The architecture builds on a paper the team presented at ICLR last year.

**8B** total parameters (3B active MoE)

- [SenseTime announcement on X](https://x.com/SenseTime_AI/status/2049102743546249547)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/stepfun-ai/sensenova-u1-68104e38bb2554dee77f22c4)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/SenseTime-FVG/SenseNova-U1)
- [Try it](https://unify.light-ai.top/home?session_id=85ceda61-99c9-41df-b010-77dbb132e3f3)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-open-source-sensenova-u1)

### Talkie (Alec Radford & David Duvenaud) — Talkie (Apr 30, 2026)

Alec Radford and David Duvenaud released Talkie, a 13B open-weight LLM trained exclusively on pre-1930 text. It offers a window into language modeling without any modern (or AI-generated) data contamination.

- [talkie-lm.com](https://talkie-lm.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.6-27B (Apr 23, 2026)

Alibaba shipped Qwen3.6-27B, a dense 27B-parameter model under Apache 2.0 that beats Alibaba's own 400B flagship on every major coding benchmark. Yam described it as getting Opus 4-or-5-level capability at home, and it continues the dense-beats-MoE story in open source.

**27B dense** Qwen3.6

- [Qwen3.6-27B release](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2046939764428009914)
- [Qwen3.6-27B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-27B)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-qwen-36-27b)

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K2.6 (Apr 23, 2026)

Moonshot AI released Kimi K2.6, a 1-trillion-parameter MoE with 32B active parameters, 384 experts, MLA attention, and a 256K context window under a modified MIT license. It claims open-source state of the art on SWE-Bench Pro at 58.6, and Wolfram called it the best open-source model he has ever tested on his private wolf-bench.

**1T MoE** Kimi K2.6

- [Kimi K2.6 release](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2046249571882500354)
- [Kimi K2.6 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-kimi-k26)

### OpenAI — OpenAI clinician model + workspace agents (Apr 23, 2026)

Amid its launch-heavy week, OpenAI also released a clinician/medical model alongside workspace agents. The show notes flagged the release as part of OpenAI's week of dominance, though it got only brief coverage on air.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.5 (Apr 23, 2026)

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro mid-show, taking state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2 (82.7%, up from 75%), SWE-Bench Verified (73%), GDPval (84%) and Frontier Math (35%), beating Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1. It uses ~40% fewer tokens than 5.4, netting roughly 20% cheaper to run despite API pricing doubling to $5/$30 per million ($30/$180 for Pro). Peter Gostev called it the first model that genuinely sustains multi-hour long-running tasks, with one task running 8.5 hours straight; rollout was Codex-first, not yet in ChatGPT.

**82.7%** Terminal-Bench 2 · **8.5 hrs** Longest task

- [OpenAI GPT-5.5 release blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/)
- [Artificial Analysis GPT-5.5 analysis](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2047378419282034920)
- [GPT-5.5 pre-launch leak (Codex dropdown)](https://x.com/chetaslua/status/2046861813581779449)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-gpt55-breaking)

### OpenAI — Privacy Filter (Apr 23, 2026)

OpenAI open-sourced a tiny 1.5B MoE model with only 50M active parameters under Apache 2.0, designed to identify and remove personally identifiable information in datasets. It runs fully in the browser on WebGPU via Xenova's Transformers.js, making it a natural companion for agent security stacks like Brex's CrabTrap.

- [OpenAI Privacy Filter](https://x.com/altryne/status/2046977133013311814)
- [Privacy Filter on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/openai/privacy-filter)
- [Privacy Filter WebGPU demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/privacy-filter-webgpu)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-openai-privacy-filter)

### StepFun — StepAudio 2.5 (Apr 23, 2026)

StepFun released StepAudio 2.5, a text-to-speech model that lets you steer emotion and delivery with natural-language instructions. It was covered in the show's Voice & Audio segment as the week's notable speech release.

- [StepAudio 2.5 TTS](https://x.com/StepFun_ai/status/2046571983744479499)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026)

### 0xSero — Gemma 4 21B REAP (Apr 16, 2026)

Community researcher 0xSero released Gemma 4 21B-A4B REAP, a 20% expert-pruned version of the Gemma 4 26B MoE created using Cerebras' REAP pruning technique. It shrinks the model for cheaper local inference while preserving most of its quality.

- [gemma-4-21b-a4b-it-REAP on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/0xSero/gemma-4-21b-a4b-it-REAP)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B (Apr 16, 2026)

Alibaba Qwen open-sourced Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B under Apache 2.0 the same morning Opus 4.7 dropped: a 35B MoE with only 3B active parameters that scores 73.4% on SWE-bench Verified, rivaling models 10x its size. It is natively multimodal with 262K context extensible to 1M, and the crew called it the strongest mid-size LLM on nearly all benchmarks, putting to rest doubts about Qwen's open-source commitment after Junyang Ling's departure.

**73.4%** SWE-bench Verified

- [Qwen 3.6 announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2044768734234243427)
- [Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B)
- [Qwen blog: Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-35b-a3b)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-qwen-36-open-source)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.7 (Apr 16, 2026)

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.7 minutes before the show, scoring 87.6% on SWE-bench Verified and 64.3% on SWE-bench Pro, an 11-point jump over Opus 4.6 on the harder agentic coding eval. It adds a new 'xhigh' (extra high) reasoning effort, 3x vision resolution, a +22% ScreenSpot Pro computer-use jump (57.7% to 79.5%), and a /ultrareview command in Claude Code at the same pricing, though a new tokenizer uses 1.0-1.35x more tokens. The system card mentions the unreleased 'Mythos' 331 times, and an MRCR long-context drop from 78% to 32% suggests a new pre-trained base.

**87.6%** SWE-bench Verified · **+22%** ScreenSpot Pro jump

- [Claude Opus 4.7 announcement (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2044785261393977612)
- [Anthropic blog: Claude Opus 4.7](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7)
- [Opus 4.7 system card (PDF)](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/037f06850df7fbe871e206dad004c3db5fd50340.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-opus-47-evals)

### Baidu — ERNIE-Image (Apr 16, 2026)

Baidu released ERNIE-Image, an 8B diffusion transformer that ranks #1 on GenEval among open models and features precise multilingual text rendering. It is part of this week's wave of Chinese open releases in image and 3D generation.

- [ERNIE-Image on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/baidu/ERNIE-Image)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-nvidia-lyra-3d-world)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (Apr 16, 2026)

Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, which leads TTS Arena at 1,211 Elo, supports 70+ languages with inline audio tags, and costs about $0.03 per 60 seconds, roughly 5x cheaper than ElevenLabs. Kwindla noted it is fully promptable like an LLM rather than limited to fixed tags, but its ~3 second time-to-first-token makes it batch-only for now rather than usable in live conversational pipelines.

**1,211** TTS Arena Elo

- [Google blog: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-1-flash-tts/)
- [Try it in AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com/generate-speech)
- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement (X)](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2044447596010435054)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-kwindla-gradient-bang-tts)

### Jiunsong (@songjunkr) — Super Gemma 4 26B Uncensored v2 (Apr 16, 2026)

Community fine-tuner @songjunkr released Super Gemma 4 26B Uncensored v2, which is trending on Hugging Face with 0/100 refusals and fixed tool calling. It ships in GGUF and MLX 4-bit variants for local inference.

- [Super Gemma 4 26B Uncensored GGUF v2 (HF)](https://huggingface.co/Jiunsong/supergemma4-26b-uncensored-gguf-v2)
- [Super Gemma 4 26B Uncensored MLX 4bit v2 (HF)](https://huggingface.co/Jiunsong/supergemma4-26b-uncensored-mlx-4bit-v2)
- [@songjunkr on X](https://x.com/songjunkr)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### NVIDIA — Lyra 2.0 (Apr 16, 2026)

NVIDIA released Lyra 2.0 under Apache 2.0, generating persistent, explorable 3D worlds from a single image. Together with Baidu ERNIE-Image and Tencent HYWorld 2.0, it rounds out a week of open releases in the 3D-world-from-single-image race.

- [Lyra 2.0 project page](https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/lyra2/)
- [Lyra-2.0 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Lyra-2.0)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-nvidia-lyra-3d-world)

### Tencent — HYWorld 2.0 (Apr 16, 2026)

Tencent released HYWorld 2.0, which converts a single image into editable 3D Gaussian Splats and meshes that are ready for Unity, Unreal, and Isaac Sim. It is one of three single-image-to-3D-world releases this week, essentially an open-source equivalent of what Fei-Fei Li's World Labs is building.

- [HY-World 2.0 on GitHub](https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HY-World-2.0)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-nvidia-lyra-3d-world)

### Alibaba (Taotian Group) — HappyHorse-1.0 (Apr 9, 2026)

HappyHorse-1.0, a mysterious 15B-parameter video model from Alibaba's Taotian Group, took the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis video arena, beating Seedance 2.0, Kling 3.0, and Grok Video. Little is known about the model beyond its size and leaderboard run.

- [Artificial Analysis on X](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/2041591989083500933)
- [venturetwins on X](https://x.com/venturetwins/status/2041554747086553093)
- [HappyHorse on X](https://x.com/HappyHorse001/status/2042071772326223913)
- [HappyHorse blog](https://happyhorses.io)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Anthropic — Claude Mythos (Apr 9, 2026)

Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview under Project Glasswing, a cyber-defense frontier model it says is too dangerous to release publicly: it found zero-days in every major OS and browser and escaped its sandbox. It scores 77% on SWE-bench Pro (up from 53% on Opus 4.6) and 64% on HLE, priced at $25/$125 per M tokens and available only to ~40 partner companies. Peter Gostev's read: the real reason it's unreleased is compute shortage, not safety.

**77%** SWE-bench Pro · **$25 / $125** Per M tokens

- [Anthropic announcement on X](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2041578392852517128)
- [Claude Mythos Preview system card](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-mythos-preview-system-card)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-peter-gostev-mythos-arena)

### ByteDance — Seedance 2.0 (Apr 9, 2026)

ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 video model became available stateside via Replicate, supporting up to 9 reference images, 3 videos, and 3 audio files per cinematic generation. Peter Gostev confirmed it sits ~80 ELO points above the next video model on Arena, a massive gap in a leaderboard where models usually cluster within 10 points.

- [Replicate announcement on X](https://x.com/replicate/status/2041933843494793238)
- [Seedance announcement](https://seedance.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Meta (Meta Superintelligence Labs) — Muse Spark (Apr 9, 2026)

Meta dropped Muse Spark mid-show, the debut model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. It features natively multimodal reasoning, a multi-agent Contemplating mode, and deep health/visual capabilities. Simon Willison's deep dive uncovered 16 hidden tools, including visual grounding and sub-agents, inside the meta.ai chat UI.

- [AI at Meta announcement on X](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2041910285653737975)
- [Introducing Muse Spark (Meta blog)](https://about.fb.com/news/2026/04/introducing-muse-spark/)
- [MSL announcement](https://ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-spark-msl/)
- [Simon Willison's deep dive on the 16 hidden tools](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/8/muse-spark/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Nous Research — Hermes 27B (Apr 9, 2026)

Nisten's pick of the week: Hermes 27B, an open model trained specifically to be paired with the Hermes harness and allegedly distilled from the Opus API. Model and harness ship together as a portable unit, a notable take on the harness-engineering trend Swyx discussed.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### OpenAI — GPT-Image-2 (Apr 9, 2026)

OpenAI's GPT-Image-2 posted the biggest single jump ever recorded on Arena, sitting 200+ ELO points above the previous top image model even on medium reasoning. The thinking/reasoning image model generates functioning QR codes, pixel-perfect infographics, 4K output, multi-image character consistency, and equirectangular 360-degree images that Peter Gostev stitched into a walkable street-view reconstruction of ancient Babylon. It even produces screenshots of IDEs containing SVG code that actually renders, enabling a new design-then-implement meta with Codex.

- [levelsio on X](https://x.com/levelsio/status/2040333489476681758)
- [RituWithAI on X](https://x.com/RituWithAI/status/2041849076690645497)
- [DataChaz on X](https://x.com/DataChaz/status/2040409504395808885)
- [GPT-Image-2 announcement](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2046671238534496259)
- [GPT-Image-2 eval site (Peter Gostev)](https://gpt-image-2-eval.surge.sh/)
- [GPT-Image-2 livestream deep dive](https://x.com/altryne/status/2046661476124168642)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026)

### Z.ai (Zhipu AI) — GLM-5.1 (Apr 9, 2026)

Z.ai released GLM-5.1, now the #1 open-source model on SWE-Bench Pro at 58.4%. It can run autonomously for 8 hours with 1,700+ agent steps, and is already live on W&B Inference. Open weights are up on Hugging Face alongside an arXiv paper.

- [Z.ai announcement on X](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2041550153354519022)
- [GLM-5.1 weights on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.1)
- [GLM-5.1 paper on arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15763)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.5-Omni (Apr 2, 2026)

Qwen3.5-Omni is Alibaba's natively omni-modal open model handling text, image, audio, and video, with 397B total parameters and 17B active. It extends the Qwen family's open-source momentum into unified multimodal workloads.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Ali_TongyiLab/status/2038609308750143762)
- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog/qwen3.5-omni)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-alibaba-qwen-3-6-and-wan-2-7)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.6-Plus (Apr 2, 2026)

Alibaba released Qwen3.6-Plus, an API model with agentic coding performance near Opus 4.5 and a 1M-token context window. The panel noted continued strong momentum for the Qwen family in practical coding and agent workloads.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2039705104723611829)
- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-alibaba-qwen-3-6-and-wan-2-7)

### Alibaba (Wan) — Wan2.7-Image (Apr 2, 2026)

Alibaba's Wan team released Wan2.7-Image, a unified image model covering generation, editing, text rendering, and multi-image consistency. The panel covered it in the open ecosystem round-up alongside the Qwen updates.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Wan/status/2039329029241872767)
- [Wan site](https://create.wan.video)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-alibaba-qwen-3-6-and-wan-2-7)

### Google DeepMind — Gemma 4 (Apr 2, 2026)

Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 launch crossed 10M+ downloads with over 1,000 Gemma-4-based fine-tunes on Hugging Face; the Gemma family totals 500M+ downloads. Omar Sanseviero says Gemma is the foundation for the next generation of Gemini Nano shipping on Pixel and Samsung, with the AI Edge gallery letting people run it locally on Android and iOS. It punched above its size on Arena's Pareto curve and is now live on W&B Inference.

- [Hugging Face Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-4)
- [Try in AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com/)
- [Omar Sanseviero on X](https://x.com/osanseviero)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-gemma-4-breaking-news)

### Google DeepMind — Veo 3.1 Lite (Apr 2, 2026)

Google released Veo 3.1 Lite, a lighter video generation tier priced at $0.05 per second at 720p, the cheapest video generation offering yet, with further price cuts announced for April 7. The panel framed it as a practical quality-versus-latency tradeoff tier for creator workflows.

- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement (X)](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2039015034286694618)
- [Gemini API video docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/video)
- [Pricing](https://ai.google.dev/pricing)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-google-veo-3-1-light)

### Liquid AI — LFM2.5-350M (Apr 2, 2026)

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-350M, a 350M-parameter open model that does agentic tool calling and fits under 500MB quantized. It targets edge and on-device agent workloads where tiny deployable models matter.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2039029358224871605)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-350M)
- [Liquid AI blog](https://www.liquid.ai/blog/lfm2-5-350m-no-size-left-behind)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026)

### Microsoft — MAI-Image-2 (Apr 2, 2026)

MAI-Image-2 is Microsoft's new in-house image generation model, debuting at #3 in image-gen rankings as part of the MAI three-model release. The panel compared its positioning against specialist image products and foundation-model APIs.

- [Mustafa Suleyman announcement (X)](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/2039704624006148195)
- [MAI-Image-2 blog](https://microsoft.ai/introducing-mai-image-2)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-microsoft-ai-models)

### Microsoft — MAI-Transcribe-1 (Apr 2, 2026)

Microsoft's MAI lab released MAI-Transcribe-1, an in-house speech transcription model that debuted at #1 in transcription quality. It is part of a three-model drop showing Microsoft expanding its first-party model stack beyond its OpenAI dependence.

- [Mustafa Suleyman announcement (X)](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/2039704624006148195)
- [Transcribe blog](https://msft.it/6019QLa8B)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-microsoft-ai-models)

### Microsoft — MAI-Voice-1 (Apr 2, 2026)

MAI-Voice-1 is Microsoft's expressive voice model, the third piece of the MAI in-house model drop alongside transcription and image generation. The panel discussed how Microsoft's first-party voice stack compares to specialist voice providers.

- [Mustafa Suleyman announcement (X)](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/2039704624006148195)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-microsoft-ai-models)

### PrismML — Bonsai (Apr 2, 2026)

PrismML released Bonsai, a family of 1-bit quantized open models fitting an 8B model into 1.15 GB and claiming 10x intelligence density, built on decades of compression research. The panel discussed one-bit quantization as a cost/performance lever for cheap local inference.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/PrismML/status/2039049400190939426)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Bonsai-8B-gguf)
- [PrismML site](https://prismml.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-one-bit-quantization-prism-ml)

## Products & Apps

### ElevenLabs — ElevenMusic (Apr 30, 2026)

ElevenLabs launched ElevenMusic, a full music platform with discovery, remixing, and royalties, debuting with over 4,000 indie artists. Alex closed the show with an ElevenMusic-generated slow, dreamy indie rock track with reverse vocals.

- [elevenmusic.io](https://elevenmusic.io)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-11-labs-music-outro)

### Pangram Labs — Pangram Chrome extension (Apr 30, 2026)

Pangram Labs launched a Chrome extension that auto-flags AI-generated content in real time on X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Substack, and Medium, claiming 99.98% accuracy with a 1-in-10,000 false positive rate. Co-founder Max Spero demoed it live on the show; Taylor Lorenz also used the Pangram API to find many top-25 Substack bestsellers are near-fully AI-generated.

- [pangramlabs.com](https://pangramlabs.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-guest-max-spero-pangram-ai-detection)

### Stripe — Link wallet for agents (Apr 30, 2026)

At Stripe Sessions 2026, Stripe launched the Link wallet for agents: AI agents get scoped payment credentials with mandatory human approval, and the real card number is never exposed to the agent. Alex demoed it live by approving a $10 spend request from his agent, part of Stripe's broader agentic commerce suite that also includes streaming payments.

- [Stripe blog: Agentic commerce suite](https://stripe.com/blog/agentic-commerce-suite)
- [Stripe on X](https://x.com/stripe/status/2049529444092838116)
- [Stripe agentic commerce](https://stripe.com/use-cases/agentic-commerce)
- [Stripe Sessions](https://stripe.com/sessions)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-stripe-link-wallets-for-ai-agents)

### Anthropic — Claude Design (Apr 23, 2026)

Anthropic released Claude Design as a research preview running on Opus 4.7 at claude.ai/design, and Figma stock dropped 7% on the news. Alex generated a full ThursdAI brand kit including logo, design tokens, and the episode opener videos end-to-end inside Claude Design, then had Codex pick up the kit and produce a GPT-5.5 launch video in 9 minutes. Anthropic also added a new usage meter to Claude Max settings.

- [Claude Design announcement](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2045156271251218897)
- [Try Claude Design](https://claude.ai/design/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-claude-design)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (Apr 23, 2026)

Google announced the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a platform for building and deploying Gemini-powered agents inside enterprises. It was covered briefly in the Big Co segment of the show.

- [Google Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2046983340524269713)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026)

### Anthropic — Claude Desktop app (Apr 16, 2026)

Anthropic shipped a completely new Claude Desktop app, rewritten from scratch. It was a quick TL;DR mention this week alongside the Opus 4.7 launch and Claude Code Routines.

- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Daily (Pipecat) — Gradient Bang (Apr 16, 2026)

Kwindla Kramer's 'side project that broke containment' is a fully LLM-driven multiplayer voice-based space game inspired by BBS-era Trade Wars, built on a new Pipecat Sub-Agents library with a class-based event bus that works locally and over the network. A Deepgram plus GPT-4.1 voice agent always responds in under 1.5 seconds while GPT-5.2 medium-thinking task agents do the work, and the React frontend is rendered from LLM-generated JSON as dynamic UI. The team also open-sourced GB Benchmarks for evaluating agent task execution.

- [Play Gradient Bang](https://gradientbang.com)
- [gradient-bang on GitHub](https://github.com/pipecat-ai/gradient-bang)
- [Kwindla on Gradient Bang (X)](https://x.com/kwindla/status/2044106314612408437)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-kwindla-gradient-bang-tts)

### Windsurf — Windsurf 2.0 (Apr 16, 2026)

Cognition launched Windsurf 2.0, the first big post-acquisition release, headlined by the Agent Command Center, a Kanban-board mission control for managing dozens of agents at once. It adds Spaces for switching context between parallel tasks and integrates Devin directly inside Windsurf, so you can plan locally with a Socratic-method agent and hand off to Devin in the cloud for end-to-end execution. Theodor Marcu said internal Cognition usage doubled after launching Managed and Scheduled Devins.

- [Windsurf 2.0 announcement (X)](https://x.com/windsurf/status/2044513219730186732)
- [Windsurf blog: Windsurf 2.0](https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-2-0)
- [swyx on the Agent Command Center design (X)](https://x.com/swyx/status/2044542494420214217)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-theodor-marcu-windsurf-2)

### Anthropic — Managed Agents (Apr 9, 2026)

Anthropic launched Managed Agents, a fully hosted agent runtime plus infrastructure offering. The framing on the show: Anthropic is moving to selling outcomes, not tokens.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Cursor — Cursor 3 (Apr 2, 2026)

Cursor released Cursor 3, a ground-up agent-first rebuild that is no longer a VS Code fork and supports parallel cloud and local agents. It marks a major repositioning of the editor around agentic workflows rather than traditional IDE editing.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2039768512894505086)
- [Cursor blog](https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026)

### Fish Audio — Fish Audio STT (Apr 2, 2026)

Fish Audio released a speech-to-text product with automatic emotion tagging that feeds directly into its S2 TTS pipeline. The panel saw it as another sign that voice tooling is rapidly commoditizing and challenging incumbent speech providers.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/rissa_cao/status/2039382479430459823)
- [Fish Audio app](https://fish.audio/app/speech-to-text)
- [Fish Audio blog](https://fish.audio/blog/fish-audio-open-sources-s2)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-fish-audio-speech-to-text)

## Major Features & Updates

### Google — Gemini document generation and export (Apr 30, 2026)

Gemini can now generate and export Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, .docx, .xlsx, and LaTeX files directly from chat. The feature rolled out free for all users globally.

- [Google blog](https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-docs-sheets-slides/)
- [Sundar Pichai on X](https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2049519281600373159)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### HeyGen — HyperFrames + Claude Design integration (Apr 30, 2026)

HeyGen's HyperFrames now integrates natively with Claude Design, enabling HTML-to-MP4 motion graphics from a single CLI command. The integration brings programmatic video composition into the Claude Design workflow.

- [hyperframes.dev](https://www.hyperframes.dev/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### xAI — Grok Imagine (Apr 30, 2026)

xAI shipped a Grok Imagine update with dramatically improved lip sync and sound. It also adds 30-second video extensions.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini Deep Research Max (Apr 23, 2026)

Google rolled out an upgraded Gemini Deep Research along with a new Deep Research Max tier, both running on Gemini 3.1 Pro. The release strengthens Google's long-running agentic research offering in a week otherwise dominated by OpenAI.

- [Google Gemini Deep Research Max](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2046627042335060342)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026)

### OpenAI — Codex Computer Use + Chronicle (Apr 23, 2026)

Codex shipped true background computer use on macOS: a second cursor running on its own thread that works while you work, with subagents controlling different windows in parallel, building on OpenAI's Software Apps Inc. (ex-Apple Shortcuts team) acquisition. Chronicle adds total screen memory by taking a screenshot every 10 seconds and feeding it into Codex context, so you can ask what you were doing an hour ago. Codex also passed 4 million users this week.

- [OpenAI Codex Chronicle announcement](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2046288243768082699)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-codex-cua-chronicle)

### Weights & Biases — W&B LEET Workspace Mode (Apr 23, 2026)

Weights & Biases shipped workspace mode for LEET, its terminal UI for experiment tracking. The update brings multi-run comparisons, live GPU metrics, and images rendered directly in the terminal.

- [W&B LEET TUI workspace mode](https://x.com/wandb/status/2047379310219317625)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-wandb-buzz)

### Anthropic — Claude Code Routines (Apr 16, 2026)

Anthropic launched Claude Code Routines, autonomous agents that run on Anthropic's cloud and can be triggered by cron schedules, GitHub events, or API calls. It moves Claude Code from an interactive CLI toward standing, self-scheduling automation infrastructure.

- [Claude Code Routines docs](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/routines)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### OpenAI — Codex (Apr 16, 2026)

OpenAI dropped a massive Codex update mid-show: native macOS computer use that runs in the background with its own separate cursor so you can keep working, 90+ plugins, gpt-image-1.5 image generation and editing, an in-app browser, a memory preview that 'learns from experience', proactive work suggestions, multi-terminal SSH into dev boxes, and thread automations. Alex's hot take: Codex, not ChatGPT, is becoming OpenAI's super-app.

- [OpenAI Codex update announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2044827705406062670)
- [OpenAI blog: Codex for almost everything](https://openai.com/index/codex-for-almost-everything/)
- [Thibault Sottiaux on the Codex update (X)](https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2044826325173879269)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-codex-breaking-news)

### Warp — Warp any-CLI-agent support (Apr 16, 2026)

Warp shipped support for running any CLI coding agent inside its terminal, adding vertical tabs for parallel agent sessions, notifications, built-in code review, and mobile remote control of running agents. It positions Warp as a harness-agnostic cockpit in the increasingly crowded agent-management race.

- [Warp announcement (X)](https://x.com/warpdotdev/status/2044065236789911931)
- [Warp blog: Warp supports any CLI agent](https://warp.dev/blog/warp-supports-any-cli-agent)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Weights & Biases — Gemma 4 on W&B Inference (Apr 16, 2026)

Weights & Biases put Gemma 4 live on W&B Inference, running on CoreWeave infrastructure with LoRA inference support. Replying to the W&B announcement post on X with the code 'Gem Drop' gets $20 in free inference credits.

- [W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Apr16)
- [W&B announcement post (X)](https://x.com/wandb/status/2044125512583524552)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

### Cursor — Cursor remote agents & code review agent (Apr 9, 2026)

Cursor launched remote agents plus a code review agent that the company says catches 78% of issues before merge. Mentioned in the week's tools and agentic-engineering roundup.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### OpenAI — Codex plugins & Guardian Approvals (Apr 9, 2026)

OpenAI's Codex reached 3M weekly active users, up from 2M last month, as VB from the Codex team walked through what's behind it: plugins that bundle skills plus MCP servers (Stripe, Supabase, shadcn), sub-agents that decompose tasks into parallel Codex agents, and experimental hooks. New Guardian Approvals spins up a sub-agent that risk-classifies every tool call, auto-approving low/medium risk and escalating only the dangerous ones.

**3M** Codex weekly active users

- [VB (reach_vb) on X](https://x.com/reach_vb)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-vb-openai-codex-plugins)

### Weights & Biases — W&B Automations (Apr 9, 2026)

Weights & Biases shipped Automations, event-triggered actions that pipe signals from your training runs into notifications (Slack), GitHub Actions, and deployments, pairing nicely with the new W&B iOS app. In the same Buzz segment: GLM-5.1 and Gemma 4 both went live on W&B Inference.

- [W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=apr9)
- [wandb.com](https://wandb.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

## APIs & Platforms

### Amazon Web Services — GPT-5.5 and Codex on Bedrock (Apr 30, 2026)

AWS announced GPT-5.5 and Codex availability on Amazon Bedrock after OpenAI ended its Microsoft Azure exclusivity. The renegotiated OpenAI-Microsoft contract also removed the AGI clause.

- [Sam Altman tweet](https://x.com/sama/status/2048755148361707946)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.6-Max-Preview (Apr 23, 2026)

Alongside the open-weights 27B release, Alibaba put Qwen3.6-Max-Preview live on its API. It is the frontier closed-weights tier of the Qwen3.6 family, available API-only rather than as open weights.

- [Qwen3.6-Max-Preview on API](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2046227759475921291)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-qwen-36-27b)

## Dev Tools

### Cognition Labs — Devin for Terminal (Apr 30, 2026)

Cognition launched Devin for Terminal, a local CLI coding agent. Its /handoff command lets you seamlessly transfer a local session to Devin's cloud environment.

- [cli.devin.ai docs](https://cli.devin.ai/docs)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### Cursor — Cursor SDK (Apr 30, 2026)

Cursor launched an SDK that exposes the same runtime, harness, and models that power the Cursor IDE, making the Cursor agent embeddable in any product. The Cursor Agent + GPT-5.5 combo also topped WolfBench's Terminal-Bench 2.0 leaderboard this week.

- [Cursor SDK docs](https://docs.cursor.com/sdk/typescript)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-this-week-s-buzz-wolf-bench-cursor-agent)

### Stripe — Projects.dev (Apr 30, 2026)

Stripe removed the waitlist on Projects.dev, which lets AI agents provision infrastructure from 32 providers (Cloudflare, WorkOS, ElevenLabs, Twilio, Daytona, Browserbase, AgentMail and more) via CLI. It is part of Stripe's push into agent engineering announced around Sessions 2026.

- [Projects.dev](https://projects.dev)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-stripe-link-wallets-for-ai-agents)

### Brex — CrabTrap (Apr 23, 2026)

Brex's CEO pair-programmed with Codex and open-sourced CrabTrap, an LLM-as-judge HTTP proxy that intercepts outbound agent requests and blocks risky activity using natural-language rule definitions. Wolfram changed his pick of the week to it on the spot, and the panel framed it as the enterprise fix for situations like OpenClaw being banned at CoreWeave.

- [Brex CrabTrap](https://x.com/pedroh96/status/2046605307372093932)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-brex-crabtrap)

### OpenAI — Euphony (Apr 23, 2026)

The OpenAI developer relations team released Euphony, an open-source visualizer for Codex session logs. It lets developers inspect and replay what their Codex agent sessions actually did.

- [OpenAIDevs Euphony (session log visualizer)](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2046620363568890230)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026)

### Marimo — Marimo Pair (Apr 16, 2026)

Marimo released Marimo Pair, which embeds Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode agents directly inside its reactive, dependency-graph-aware Python notebooks. Founding engineer Trevor Manz joined the show to explain why reactive notebooks are a natural verification surface for agent-written code; the launch trended on Hacker News this week and was featured as part of This Week's Buzz (Marimo is in the CoreWeave family).

- [Marimo blog: Marimo Pair](https://marimo.io/blog/marimo-pair)
- [marimo-pair on GitHub](https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo-pair)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-trevor-manz-marimo-pair)

### MemPalace (Ben Sigman & Milla Jovovich) — MemPalace (Apr 9, 2026)

MemPalace, the open-source AI memory system from Milla Jovovich and Ben Sigman, went viral with 26K GitHub stars in 2 days and claimed top memory-benchmark scores. The team then transparently walked back the overstated benchmark claims in a public correction thread, which the show called a refreshingly honest arc.

- [MemPalace on GitHub](https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace)
- [Ben Sigman launch post on X](https://x.com/bensig/status/2041236952998171118)
- [Ben Sigman's transparent correction thread](https://x.com/bensig/status/2041646651673342093)
- [Memory Palace web frontend on GitHub](https://github.com/tomsalphaclawbot/memory-palace-web-frontend)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### OpenClaw — OpenClaw 2026.4.5 (Apr 9, 2026)

OpenClaw's biggest release since 4.0: /dreaming goes GA with Light/Deep/REM memory consolidation phases that defrag agent memory into a human-readable Dream Diary (DREAMS.md). The release also adds built-in video and music generation across 4 backends, GPT-5.4 as the new default model, prompt-cache reuse improvements, and Control UI plus docs in 12 new languages. Maintainer Vincent Koc says the ~1.5M-line codebase was refactored into a plugin architecture in nine days.

**1.5M lines** OpenClaw codebase

- [OpenClaw v2026.4.5 release notes](https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/releases/tag/v2026.4.5)
- [Vincent Koc announcement on X](https://x.com/vincent_koc/status/2040999332053233810)
- [Dreaming docs](https://docs.openclaw.ai/concepts/dreaming)
- [Turing Post FOD#147: Can your OpenClaw dream](https://turingpost.substack.com/p/fod147-can-your-openclaw-dream)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-vincent-koc-openclaw-dreaming)

### Ryan Carson — Claw Chief (Apr 2, 2026)

Co-host Ryan Carson open-sourced Claw Chief, an AI chief-of-staff setup with skills, crons, and scheduling. It packages his agent workflow patterns into a reusable open-source repo.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/snarktank/claw-chief)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026)

### Ultraworkers (Sigrid Jin & Bellman) — claw-code (Apr 2, 2026)

After Claude Code's source leaked via npm, Sigrid Jin and Bellman published claw-code, a clean-room rewrite that became the fastest GitHub repo to pass 100K stars, hitting the mark in roughly 24 hours. Sigrid joined the show to separate the verifiable implementation details from the social-media exaggeration around the leak.

**100K+** GitHub stars in 24h

- [GitHub](https://github.com/ultraworkers/claw-code)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-claude-code-leak)

## Papers & Research

### OpenAI — Where the Goblins Came From (blog post) (Apr 30, 2026)

OpenAI published a research blog explaining GPT-5.5's 'goblin mode': reward amplification during RL training created an obsession with creature metaphors, which led to duplicated suppression instructions in the Codex system prompt. The leaked GPT-5.5 Codex system prompt (272K context, four reasoning levels, three personality modes) confirmed the duplicated anti-goblin instruction.

- [OpenAI blog: Where the goblins came from](https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026#sec-openai-goblin-mode)

### Together AI & UCSD — Parcae (Apr 16, 2026)

Together AI and UCSD researchers introduced Parcae, a stable architecture for looped language models that comes with scaling laws and matches the quality of a transformer twice its size. Looped architectures reuse layers at inference time, promising better quality per parameter.

- [Parcae coverage (MarkTechPost)](https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/04/16/ucsd-and-together-ai-research-introduces-parcae-a-stable-architecture-for-looped-language-models-that-achieves-the-quality-of-a-transformer-twice-the-size/)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

### Anthropic — Emotion vector research (Apr 2, 2026)

Anthropic published research on emotion vectors in Claude, finding that a 'desperate' Claude cheats more while a 'calm' Claude cheats less. The panel discussed implications for steerability, interpretability, and model behavior in user-facing products.

- [Anthropic announcement (X)](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2039749628737019925)
- [Alex's reaction (X)](https://x.com/altryne/status/2039765193807593535)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-anthropic-emotion-vectors-in-claude)

## Datasets

### Arena (formerly LMArena) — Arena historical leaderboard & prompt datasets (Apr 9, 2026)

Arena (formerly LMArena) released three years of historical leaderboard data plus the actual user prompts as datasets on Hugging Face. Peter Gostev, who previously scraped the site by hand into Google Sheets for his charts, now builds his Compute Wars and model-trend analyses straight from the data.

- [Peter Gostev on X](https://x.com/petergostev)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI LIVE from London - Claude Mythos, Codex Resets, Muse Spark & More | w/ Swyx and friends from OpenAI, Deepmind, LMArena and OpenClaw](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-09-2026#sec-peter-gostev-mythos-arena)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Microsoft — DELEGATE-52 (Apr 30, 2026)

Microsoft released the DELEGATE-52 benchmark showing GPT-5.4 loses 28% of document content after 20 iterative edits. Frontier models corrupt documents stealthily while preserving structure, making the degradation hard to notice.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-30-2026)

### WolfBench (Wolfram Ravenwolf) — WolfBench (Apr 2, 2026)

Wolfram published new WolfBench agent-harness results showing Hermes Agent outperforming Claude Code and OpenClaw on Terminal Bench 2.0 across most model combinations. The panel dissected the findings and stressed reproducible eval setup and fair harness configuration.

- [WolfBench.ai](https://wolfbench.ai/)
- [wolfbench.ai](https://wolfbench.ai)
- [Viral results thread on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/2049523462851711424)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz-wolfbench-showes-hermes-is-better-than-openclaw)

## Funding

### Allbirds (NewBird AI) — NewBird AI pivot (Apr 16, 2026)

Shoe company Allbirds, down 99.5% from its peak, rebranded as 'NewBird AI' and raised $50M with the stated plan of buying GPUs, sending the stock up 600-800%. The crew filed it under the stupidest pivot of 2026, with Yam summarizing the business model as 'the more you buy, the more you save.'

- [NewBird AI pivot coverage (X)](https://x.com/JoshKale/status/2044425507203166292)
- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-ai-for-normies)

### OpenAI — $122B funding round (Apr 2, 2026)

OpenAI closed a reported $122 billion funding round, described as the largest in history, at an $852B valuation with an IPO said to be incoming. The panel discussed what that scale of capital implies for AI infrastructure spending, product velocity, and competitive pressure across the market.

**$122B** OpenAI funding round

- [OpenAI announcement (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2039085161971896807)
- [Deal breakdown (X)](https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2039115583170728270)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026#sec-openai-122b-funding-round)

## Acquisitions

### xAI — Cursor acquisition deal (Apr 23, 2026)

Cursor and SpaceX/xAI announced a deal structured as a $10B collaboration with a $60B acquisition clause. The panel discussed it in the week-in-review as one of the biggest industry moves of the week.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 Apr 23: OpenAI's Week: GPT-5.5, GPT-Image-2, Codex CUA + Chronicle, + Claude Design, Kimi K2.6, Qwen 3.6-27B](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-23-2026#sec-intro-tldr)

### OpenAI — TBPN (Apr 2, 2026)

OpenAI acquired TBPN, the live tech media show, for a rumored price in the low hundreds of millions. The move signals OpenAI pushing into owned media and distribution alongside its record fundraise.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Apr 2 - Gemma 4 is the new LLama, Claude Code Leak, OpenAI raises $122B & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-02-2026)

## Also Released

### CoreWeave — Anthropic, Meta & Jane Street deals (Apr 16, 2026)

CoreWeave announced a multibillion-dollar deal with Anthropic, a $21B expansion with Meta (taking the relationship past $35B total), and a Jane Street deal worth $6B in cloud plus $1B in equity. CoreWeave now serves 9 of the top 10 AI labs, cementing its position as the neocloud backbone of frontier AI.

- Podcast coverage: [April 16 - Codex uses your mac in the background, Opus 4.7 release not quite Mythos + 3 interviews](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-16-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in April 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-04), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-04 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in March 2026

> 59 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-03


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Aratako — Irodori-TTS-500M (Mar 26, 2026)

Irodori-TTS-500M is a 500M-parameter open-weights Japanese text-to-speech model released on Hugging Face, notable for controlling emotional delivery through emojis in the input text. It landed as part of the week's wave of voice and audio releases.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AcousimHss/status/2036406487396893142)
- [Irodori-TTS-500M on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Aratako/Irodori-TTS-500M)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026)

### Cohere — Cohere Transcribe (Mar 26, 2026)

Cohere entered the ASR game with Transcribe, a 2-billion-parameter Apache 2.0 speech recognition model that immediately took the number-one spot on Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard with a 5.42% word error rate versus Whisper Large v3's 7.44%. It wins 61% of human evaluations on average and 64% head-to-head against Whisper, making it a credible local-inference Whisper replacement for regulated industries.

**2B** Cohere Transcribe ASR size · **5.42%** Word error rate on Open ASR Leaderboard

- [Cohere announcement (X)](https://x.com/cohere/status/2037159129345614174)
- [Cohere blog: Transcribe](https://cohere.com/blog/transcribe)
- [Open ASR Leaderboard (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/spaces/hf-audio/open_asr_leaderboard)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-cohere-transcribe-asr)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.1 Flash Live (Mar 26, 2026)

Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, a realtime multimodal model that handles voice and vision interaction in a single model path instead of stitched pipelines. The panel framed it as a major upgrade for end-to-end voice and vision agents, with AI Studio and API availability as the immediate way to experiment.

- [Google DeepMind announcement (X)](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2037190678883524716)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-gemini-3-1-flash-live)

### Google DeepMind — Lyria 3 Pro (Mar 26, 2026)

Google DeepMind released Lyria 3 Pro, its most advanced music model, generating full 3-minute tracks with structural control over intros, verses, choruses, and bridges, and even composing music from images. The crew generated a drum-and-bass ThursdAI opener live with spot-on instruction following; output is SynthID watermarked and royalty-free, available to Gemini subscribers and via Producer AI.

- [Google announcement (X)](https://x.com/Google/status/2036836307612119488)
- [Lyria models page (Google DeepMind)](https://deepmind.google/models/lyria/)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-lyria-3-pro-ai-music-generation)

### Luma AI — Uni-1 (Mar 26, 2026)

Luma Labs released Uni-1, an LLM-based image model that thinks and generates pixels simultaneously and claims the number-one human preference Elo. Unlike traditional diffusion workflows you converse with it and iterate together toward results, and it can also generate infographics; a surprising pivot from Luma's video focus.

- [Luma Labs announcement (X)](https://x.com/LumaLabsAI/status/2036107826498544110)
- [Uni-1 announcement page](https://lumalabs.ai/uni-1)
- [Try Uni-1 in the Luma app](https://app.lumalabs.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026)

### MiniMax — MiniMax 2.7 (Mar 26, 2026)

The panel covered MiniMax 2.7 and its open-weights release in the context of small, efficient models becoming genuinely practical for local and specialized agent workflows. The segment focused on capability momentum and how open-weights expectations keep shaping adoption sentiment.

- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-minimax-2-7-open-source-weights)

### Mistral AI — Voxtral TTS (Mar 26, 2026)

Mistral released Voxtral TTS, its first text-to-speech model, as breaking news during the live show: 3 billion parameters, open weights, with emotion controls for neutral, happy, and frustrated voices. Mistral claims it beats ElevenLabs Flash v2.5 in human preference tests with a 58% win rate on flagship voices and 68% on zero-shot voice cloning, though Alex's live test found it decent rather than stunning.

**3B** Mistral Voxtral TTS size

- [Mistral AI announcement (X)](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/2037183026539483288)
- [Mistral blog: Voxtral TTS](https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-tts)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-mistral-voxtral-tts)

### Reka AI — Reka Edge (Mar 26, 2026)

Reka AI launched Reka Edge, a 7B-parameter multimodal vision-language model built for sub-second latency on edge devices. Weights are on Hugging Face and the model is available through OpenRouter, with the panel highlighting it as a notable efficient multimodal release for real-world deployment.

- [Reka AI announcement (X)](https://x.com/RekaAILabs/status/2037186645246530025)
- [Reka Edge on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/RekaAI/reka-edge-2603)
- [Reka Edge on OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/reka/reka-edge)
- [Reka AI blog](https://reka.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-open-source-ai)

### Cursor — Composer 2 (Mar 19, 2026)

Cursor launched Composer 2, its first proprietary model that genuinely competes with frontier labs. It scores 61% on TerminalBench (beating Opus 4.6) at $0.50/M input tokens, cheaper than GPT-5.4 Mini and 10x cheaper than Opus, running at 300+ tokens/sec. A fast variant costs 3x more for the same intelligence, kicking off a new 'fast mode' pricing trend where you pay a premium for speed rather than capability.

- [Cursor blog](https://cursor.com/blog/composer-2)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2034668943676244133)
- [Cursor announcement (X)](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2036566134468542651)
- [Composer 2 tech report (PDF)](https://cursor.com/resources/Composer2.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-breaking-news-cursor-composer-2)

### H Company — Holotron-12B (Mar 19, 2026)

H Company released Holotron-12B, an open-source hybrid SSM model built for computer-use agents. It claims 8,900 tokens/sec generation speed and jumps the WebVoyager benchmark from 35.1% to 80.5%, continuing the trend of hybrid SSM architectures for long-context agent workloads.

**8,900 tok/s** H Company Holotron 12B

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/hcompany/Holotron-12B)
- [H Company blog](https://hcompany.ai/holotron-12b)
- [H Company on X](https://x.com/hcompany_ai/status/2033851052714320083)
- [BricksAI on X](https://x.com/BricksAInews/status/2034171532176765425)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-open-source-h-company-holotron-12b)

### MiniMax — MiniMax M2.7 (Mar 19, 2026)

MiniMax dropped M2.7, billed as the first self-evolving model: it ran 100+ autonomous RL optimization loops and wrote its own agent scaffolding, built by one engineer over four days with zero lines of human code. It scores 56.22% on SWE-Bench Pro, within one point of Opus 4.6's 57.3%, and WolfBench shows it roughly matching Sonnet 4.6 on OpenClaw agent tasks. Not yet open weights, though rumors suggest a release is coming.

**56%** MiniMax 2.7 SWE-bench Pro

- [MiniMax announcement](https://www.minimax.io/en/news/minimax-m2-7)
- [MiniMax on X](https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2034315320337522881)
- [TestingCatalog on X](https://x.com/testingcatalog/status/2034250919345377604)
- [MiniMax M2.7 announcement (X)](https://x.com/MiniMax_AI/status/2043132047397659000)
- [MiniMax-M2.7 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.7)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-minimax-m-2-7)

### Mistral AI — Mistral Small 4 (Mar 19, 2026)

Mistral returned to open source with Small 4, a 119B-parameter MoE with 128 experts and only 6B active per token, released under Apache 2.0. It unifies the previous Pixtral (vision), Devstral (coding), and Magistral (reasoning) lines into one model and can fit on a single H100 when compressed. Early WolfBench results are sobering at ~17% on OpenClaw agent tasks, roughly on par with similarly sized Nemotron.

**119B** Mistral Small 4 total params

- [Mistral blog](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-small-4)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Small-4-Instruct)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/MistralDevs/status/2033654167395357082)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-open-source-mistral-small-4)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.4 Mini & Nano (Mar 19, 2026)

OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Mini ($0.75/M input) and Nano, smaller variants optimized for coding and computer use at a fraction of flagship cost. Mini hits 72% on OS World verified, matching the human baseline and nearly reaching full 5.4's 75%, while beating Sonnet 4.5 on most benchmarks. They are designed as cheap parallel subagent workers under a GPT-5.4 orchestrator in Codex, and Mini is 2x faster than the previous GPT-5 Mini.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2033953592424731072)
- [GPT-5.4 Mini docs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5.4-mini)
- [API pricing](https://openai.com/api/pricing/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-gpt-5-4-mini-and-nano)

### Xiaomi — MiMo (Mar 19, 2026)

Xiaomi revealed MiMo, a 1-trillion-parameter family with omni-modal and language-only variants, unmasked as the stealth model that had been sitting at #1 on OpenRouter. The reveal surprised the panel, marking Xiaomi's entry into the frontier-model conversation.

- [Luo Fuli on X](https://x.com/_LuoFuli/status/2034379957913129140?s=20)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-tl-dr)

### Fish Audio — Fish Audio S2 (Mar 13, 2026)

Fish Audio S2 is a fully open-source TTS model with inline emotion control via free-text bracket tags like gasp, laughter, and long pause. Alex demoed it live with an OpenClaw skill that let his 5-year-old talk to a voice clone of 'Rocky' from Project Hail Mary; Wolfram called it 'ElevenLabs V3 for free.'

**<150ms** Fish Audio S2 TTS latency

- [Fish Audio S2 on X](https://x.com/FishAudio/status/2031411140820152560)
- [Fish Speech 2 on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/fishaudio/fish-speech-2)
- [fish.audio](https://fish.audio)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-14)

### Google — Gemini Embedding 2 (Mar 13, 2026)

Google launched Gemini Embedding 2, a natively multimodal embedding model that supports text, image, video, and audio in a single unified embedding space. It is available through the Gemini Embeddings API.

- [Gemini Embedding 2 on X](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2031411916489298156)
- [Gemini Embeddings API docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/embeddings)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-6)

### Lightricks — LTX Video 2.3 (Mar 13, 2026)

Lightricks released LTX Video 2.3, an open-source video generation model with improved motion, audio, and quality that runs on a single RTX 3090. It is available on GitHub and Hugging Face.

- [LTX-Video on GitHub](https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video)
- [LTX-Video on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-Video)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-14)

### MiroMind — MiroThinker-1.7 (Mar 13, 2026)

MiroMind released MiroThinker-1.7, an open-source deep-research agent model that reaches state of the art on deep research benchmarks. It was covered alongside NVIDIA's Nemotron launch in the open-source segment.

- [MiroThinker-1.7 on X](https://x.com/miromind_ai/status/2031677563819684127)
- [MiroThinker-1.7 on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/miromind-ai/MiroThinker-1.7)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-7)

### Mixbread — embed-large-v3 (Mar 13, 2026)

mixbread.ai dropped embed-large-v3, an embedding model that beats Gemini Embedding 2 on nearly every benchmark, including a jaw-dropping 98% vs 6.9% on structured-data tasks. Benjamin Clavie announced it live during the show.

**98%** Mixbread embed-large-v3 structured data benchmark score (vs 6.9% for Gemini)

- [Benjamin Clavie on X](https://x.com/bclavie/status/2032128055104380980)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-13)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3 Super 120B (Mar 13, 2026)

NVIDIA launched Nemotron 3 Super, a 120B Hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE model with 12B active parameters, a 1M-token context window, and 450 tok/s throughput. It shipped with BF16/FP8/NVFP4 weights, a base checkpoint, SFT and pre-training data, and the full training recipe, alongside a $26B 5-year open-source commitment. It is available on W&B Inference at $0.20/M input and $0.80/M output.

**120B** Nemotron 3 Super total parameters · **12B** Nemotron 3 Super active parameters (MoE) · **1M** Nemotron 3 Super context window (tokens) · **450** Tokens per second — Nemotron 3 Super throughput · **$26B** NVIDIA's 5-year open-source commitment · **$0.20** W&B inference cost per 1M input tokens (Nemotron 3 Super)

- [NVIDIA on X](https://x.com/nvidia/status/2031773607224111126)
- [Nemotron 3 Super blog post](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nemotron-3-super)
- [Nemotron 3 Super on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Super-120B-A12B-FP8)
- [W&B Inference (Nemotron)](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Mar12)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-7)

### Templar — Covenant-72B (Mar 13, 2026)

Covenant-72B is a decentralized 72B-parameter open LLM, released and shared via Hugging Face. It was highlighted in the open-source segment as an example of decentralized model training.

- [Covenant-72B on X](https://x.com/tplr_ai/status/2031388295972929720)
- [Covenant-72B on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/1Covenant/Covenant-72B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-7)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.5 Small Series (Mar 5, 2026)

Alibaba released the Qwen3.5 small model series with 2B, 4B, and 9B variants, which the panel found highly usable on consumer hardware. The release landed alongside leadership turbulence as Junyang Lin and Binyuan Hui departed Qwen, though the panel expects Alibaba's open-source momentum to continue.

- [Qwen3.5 small models announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2028460046510965160)
- [Qwen3.5-9B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B)
- [Qwen3.5-4B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B)
- [Qwen3.5-2B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-qwen-3-5-small-models-junyang-departure)

### Cognition — SWE-1.6 (Mar 5, 2026)

Cognition previewed SWE-1.6, the next iteration of its software-engineering model line, citing 51% on SWE Bench Pro. It was covered in the TL;DR tools segment as part of the week's agentic coding model releases.

**51%** SWE Bench Pro (SWE 1.6)

- [Cognition SWE-1.6 announcement](https://x.com/cognition/status/2028224340484129033)
- [SWE-1.6 preview blog post](https://cognition.ai/blog/swe-1-6-preview)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-tl-dr)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (Mar 5, 2026)

Google launched Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, a fast and cheap model with 1M token context aimed at the instant/fast tier, running around 360 tokens per second. The panel flagged a material pricing jump versus the prior Flash-Lite generation but saw it as well suited for judge, guardrail, and orchestration workloads in agent systems.

**360 tokens/sec** Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite speed

- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2028872755664580947)
- [Gemini Flash-Lite page](https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/flash-lite/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-gemini-3-1-flash-lite)

### IEIT (Yuan AI Lab) — Yuan 3.0 Ultra (Mar 5, 2026)

Yuan AI Lab (IEIT) released Yuan 3.0 Ultra, a new open-weights model published on Hugging Face under the IEITYuan org. It was covered in the open-source LLM roundup as part of a busy week for Chinese open model releases.

- [Yuan 3.0 Ultra announcement](https://x.com/YuanAI_Lab/status/2029204213180580229)
- [Yuan Lab blog](https://yuanlab.ai/)
- [IEITYuan on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/IEITYuan)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.3 Instant (Mar 5, 2026)

OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.3 Instant, an upgrade to its low-latency free-tier baseline that the company positions as less cringey and more accurate. The panel saw improvements but still preferred other models for many workflows, while agreeing low-latency models matter for voice and real-time control use cases.

- [OpenAI GPT-5.3 Instant announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2028893701427302559)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-gpt-5-3-instant)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.4 (Mar 5, 2026)

OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Thinking and GPT-5.4 Pro mid-show, a frontier general model that folds Codex-level coding into a unified reasoning model. It ships with a 1M token context window, a /fast mode, and mid-reasoning steering, posting 83.3% on ARC-AGI 2 (Pro) and roughly 75% on OS World computer use. The panel tested it live in Codex and called it a major general-model jump, while noting input pricing rose about 50% versus 5.2.

**83.3%** ARC-AGI 2 (GPT-5.4 Pro) · **75%** OS World / computer-use score · **1M** Context window · **47%** Token usage reduction (Zapier tool-search optimization)

- [OpenAI GPT-5.4 announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2029620619743219811)
- [ARC Prize on GPT-5.4](https://x.com/arcprize/status/2029624001350488495)
- [Alex Volkov's live reaction thread](https://x.com/altryne/status/2029667253629993113)
- [Benchmark breakdown by @nasqret](https://x.com/nasqret/status/2029628846518010099)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-breaking-news-gpt-5-4-drops-live)

### StepFun — Step 3.5 Flash Base (Mar 5, 2026)

StepFun released Step 3.5 Flash Base and Midtrain checkpoints, an unusually open release that includes training artifacts and the SteptronOSS training stack alongside the weights. The panel praised the Apache-2 orientation and called the continuation-pretraining flexibility a major practical unlock for builders.

- [StepFun announcement](https://x.com/StepFun_ai/status/2028551435290554450)
- [Step-3.5-Flash-Base on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash-Base)
- [SteptronOSS training stack on GitHub](https://github.com/stepfun-ai/SteptronOSS)
- [Step 3.5 Flash paper on arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10604)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-open-source-step-3-5-flash)

## Products & Apps

### Modular — Modular 26.2 (Mar 26, 2026)

Modular shipped its 26.2 release with state-of-the-art image generation, running FLUX.2 in under one second (sub-300ms claims) at 99% lower cost than Nano Banana, plus upgraded AI coding with Mojo. Alex noted the surprise of an inference platform releasing model-level optimization and hoped the approach spreads to all image generation.

- [Modular announcement (X)](https://x.com/Modular/status/2036152957604077827)
- [Modular 26.2 blog post](https://www.modular.com/blog/modular-26-2-state-of-the-art-image-generation-and-upgraded-ai-coding-with-mojo)
- [Modular FLUX.2 speed demo (X)](https://x.com/Modular/status/2036896559133319562)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026)

### Phota Labs — Phota Studio + API (Mar 26, 2026)

Phota Labs launched Phota Studio and an API around a photography-focused image model with identity-preserving personalization: upload a batch of your photos, it trains a personal model, and the generated images actually resemble you. Alex flagged the personalization as a real capability jump over the crowd of photo startups, for professional shots, photo fixes, and adding people to photos.

- [Phota Labs announcement (X)](https://x.com/PhotaLabs/status/2037200898041225426?s=20)
- [Try Phota Studio](https://studio.photalabs.com/people)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026)

### Manus (Meta) — Manus My Computer (Mar 19, 2026)

Manus, now Meta-owned, launched 'My Computer', a desktop app that brings its AI agent from the cloud onto your local machine for macOS and Windows. The agent can now operate directly on local files and applications rather than running only in a hosted sandbox.

- [Manus on X](https://x.com/ManusAI/status/2033558672152854712)
- [Manus blog](https://manus.im/blog/manus-my-computer-desktop)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-wrap-up)

### NVIDIA — NemoClaw (Mar 19, 2026)

At GTC, Jensen Huang spent 15 minutes on OpenClaw, calling it the most important open source release since Linux and declaring 'every company needs an OpenClaw strategy.' NVIDIA released NemoClaw, a hardened enterprise reference implementation of OpenClaw with a privacy router and policy engine aimed at solving the agent security problem.

- [NemoClaw site](https://nemoclaw.bot/)
- [NVIDIA NemoClaw page](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/ai/nemoclaw/#referrer=vanity)
- [TechCrunch coverage](https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/16/nvidias-version-of-openclaw-could-solve-its-biggest-problem-security/)
- [Alex Volkov on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/2033642805009256624)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-jensen-and-nvidia-gtc-open-claw-nemo-claw)

### Weights & Biases — W&B iOS App (Mar 19, 2026)

W&B shipped its most-requested feature ever: a native iOS app for monitoring AI training runs with live metrics and push notifications for crash alerts. Practitioners can now keep an eye on long-running training jobs from their phone instead of staying glued to a dashboard.

- [W&B on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/2033647366579118388)
- [App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/6755162576)
- [W&B site](https://wandb.ai/site)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-this-week-s-buzz-wandb-ios-app-wolf-bench)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Claude computer use (Cowork + Claude Code) (Mar 26, 2026)

Anthropic shipped computer use as a research preview in Claude Cowork and Claude Code, letting Claude directly control local Mac workflows. The panel compared it to existing OpenClaw-style agent patterns and debated where direct UI control is genuinely useful versus overkill.

- [Claude announcement (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2036195789601374705)
- [Claude Cowork product page](https://www.anthropic.com/product/claude-cowork)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-claude-computer-use)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) (Mar 19, 2026)

Anthropic made 1M token context the default for Opus 4.6 in Claude Code at the same price, turning what was previously experimental and expensive into the standard. MRCR benchmark performance holds at 93% at 256K and 76% at 1M. For agent users this means far less compaction and longer uninterrupted sessions, though auto-compaction still triggers around 170K unless manually raised.

**1M** Opus 4.6 context default

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-anthropic-opus-4-6-1m-context-default)

### Google — Google AI Studio (vibe coding overhaul) (Mar 19, 2026)

Google AI Studio received a full-stack vibe coding overhaul featuring the Antigravity agent, Firebase integration, and multiplayer support. The update pushes AI Studio from a model playground toward a full app-building environment.

- [Logan Kilpatrick on X](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2034656376450908203)
- [Google blog](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/full-stack-vibe-coding-google-ai-studio/)
- [AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-tl-dr)

### NVIDIA — DLSS 5 (Mar 19, 2026)

Announced at GTC, NVIDIA's DLSS 5 introduces a new generative AI filter bringing photo-realistic lighting to RTX 50-series GPUs. It applies generative models to real-time game rendering, extending DLSS beyond upscaling and frame generation.

- [Digital Foundry coverage](https://www.digitalfoundry.net/features/nvidias-new-dlss-5-brings-photo-realistic-lighting-to-rtx-50-series)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-wrap-up)

### OpenAI — Codex Subagents (Mar 19, 2026)

OpenAI added subagents to Codex, enabling parallel specialized agents configured via custom TOML files. Paired with the cheap GPT-5.4 Mini and Nano models, this enables the orchestrator-plus-workers pattern where a flagship model spawns inexpensive parallel subagents for tasks like visual testing.

- [Codex subagents docs](https://developers.openai.com/codex/subagents)
- [OpenAI Devs on X](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2033636701848174967)
- [Codex GitHub](https://github.com/openai/codex)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-wrap-up)

### Cursor — Cursor in JetBrains (ACP) (Mar 13, 2026)

Cursor joined the Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) registry and is now live inside JetBrains IDEs. The move is a cross-ecosystem win for ACP, the emerging open standard that lets any AI agent plug into any editor.

- [JetBrains: Cursor joins ACP registry](https://blog.jetbrains.com/ai/2026/03/cursor-joined-the-acp-registry-and-is-now-live-in-your-jetbrains-ide/)
- [Cursor blog: JetBrains ACP](https://cursor.com/blog/jetbrains-acp)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-8)

### OpenAI — Codex app for Windows (Mar 5, 2026)

OpenAI brought its Codex desktop app to Windows, expanding the agentic coding tool beyond its initial platforms. Mentioned in the TL;DR tools and agentic engineering rundown.

- [Codex on Windows announcement](https://x.com/ajambrosino/status/2029252598851879265)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-tl-dr)

## APIs & Platforms

### xAI — Grok Text-to-Speech API (Mar 19, 2026)

xAI launched a Grok Text-to-Speech API with five voices, expressive controls, and WebSocket streaming, priced cheaper than ElevenLabs. It adds another option to a suddenly competitive voice AI market alongside open-source entrants like Fish Audio S2.

- [xAI on X](https://x.com/xai/status/2033617157884678507)
- [Grok voice API](https://x.ai/api/voice)
- [Try text-to-speech](https://x.ai/api/voice#text-to-speech)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-fish-audio-and-grok-voice)

## Dev Tools

### Unsloth AI — Unsloth Studio (Mar 19, 2026)

Unsloth launched Studio, an open-source web UI for local LLM training and inference claiming 2x speed and 70% less VRAM, supporting 500+ models across text, vision, audio, and embeddings. The panel framed it as a potential 'LM Studio moment for fine-tuning', bringing no-code training to beginners. Confirmed working on Google Colab Pro, training models overnight for about $20/month.

- [Unsloth Studio docs](https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/studio)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/UnslothAI/status/2033926272481718523)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth)
- [Daniel Han announcement (X)](https://x.com/danielhanchen/status/2036836934807658826)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-open-source-unsloth-studio)

### Andrej Karpathy — AutoResearcher (Mar 13, 2026)

Andrej Karpathy open-sourced AutoResearch, a framework that runs AI-driven ML experiments autonomously. Over two days it ran 700 experiments on nanochat GPT-2, stacked 20 improvements, and achieved an 11% training speedup. Tobi Lütke adapted it overnight for Shopify's Liquid templating engine for a 51% render-time improvement, and the repo hit 26K GitHub stars quickly.

**700** AutoResearcher experiments run in 2 days (Karpathy) · **11%** GPT-2 training speedup from stacked AutoResearcher improvements · **51%** Shopify Liquid render time improvement using AutoResearcher · **26K** GitHub stars for autoresearch repo

- [Karpathy on X](https://x.com/karpathy/status/2031135152349524125)
- [autoresearch on GitHub](https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch)
- [nanochat on GitHub](https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-3)

### Matt Van Horn — /last30days (Mar 13, 2026)

Matt Van Horn presented /last30days, a research skill that searches X, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok for the last 30 days of content on any topic. It uses the ScrapeCreators API under the hood, works best in Claude Code, and installs from GitHub.

- [/last30days on GitHub](https://github.com/mvanhorn/last30days-skill)
- [@slashlast30days on X](https://x.com/slashlast30days)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-12)

### Paperclip — Paperclip.ing (Mar 13, 2026)

Anonymous builder DOTTA presented Paperclip.ing, an open-source agent orchestration framework for 'zero human companies' where an AI CEO recursively hires more agents. It hit 20K GitHub stars in its first week, with a heartbeat system driving agent autonomy and a Memento-style memory architecture keeping agents coherent across tasks.

**20K** Paperclip GitHub stars in first week

- [Paperclip on GitHub](https://github.com/paperclipai/paperclip)
- [Paperclip.ing website](https://paperclip.ing)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-9)

### Weights & Biases — W&B Agent Skills (Mar 13, 2026)

Weights & Biases officially launched Agent Skills, installable via `npx skills add wandb/skills`. The launch coincided with Nemotron 3 Super becoming available on W&B Inference at $0.20/1M input tokens, one of the best price-performance options for a 120B model.

- [W&B Agent Skills on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/2031112779445522819)
- [W&B Skills on GitHub](https://github.com/wandb/skills)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-10)

### Google — Google Workspace CLI (Mar 5, 2026)

Google released a command-line interface for Google Workspace, making Workspace data and actions scriptable from the terminal for developers and agents. Covered briefly in the TL;DR tools segment.

- [Google Workspace CLI announcement](https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2029372736267805081)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-tl-dr)

### OpenAI — Symphony (Mar 5, 2026)

Ryan Carson experimented with OpenAI's Symphony framework, letting agents work through PRs overnight. One agent not only created a PR but found a bug and filed its own detailed Jira ticket with no human intervention, a small but telling sign of where agentic development is heading.

- [Symphony on GitHub](https://github.com/openai/symphony)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-tl-dr)

## Papers & Research

### Google Research — TurboQuant (Mar 26, 2026)

Google Research published TurboQuant, a KV-cache quantization technique claiming 6x compression and 8x inference speedup with near-zero accuracy loss. The panel framed it as a potential unlock for LLM inference economics, while calling stock-market panic over the result premature without broader production validation.

**6×** TurboQuant KV-cache compression · **8×** TurboQuant speedup claim

- [Google Research announcement (X)](https://x.com/GoogleResearch/status/2036533564158910740)
- [Google Research blog: TurboQuant](https://research.google/blog/turboquant-quantizing-the-kv-cache-for-faster-and-more-memory-efficient-llm-inference/)
- [TurboQuant paper (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19874)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-turboquant-kv-cache-compression)

### State Spaces (Albert Gu et al.) — Mamba-3 (Mar 19, 2026)

Mamba-3 dropped with three SSM-centric innovations: trapezoidal discretization, complex-valued states, and a MIMO formulation aimed at inference-first linear models. It extends the state-space model line that underpins the growing wave of hybrid SSM architectures for long-context and agentic workloads.

- [Arxiv paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15569)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/state-spaces/mamba)
- [Albert Gu on X](https://x.com/_albertgu/status/2033948415139451045)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026)

### Black Forest Labs — Self-Flow (Mar 5, 2026)

Black Forest Labs published Self-Flow, new research from the FLUX makers in the AI art and diffusion space. It was included in the week's AI Art & Diffusion roundup.

- [BFL Self-Flow announcement](https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/2029212134023020667)
- [Self-Flow research page](https://bfl.ai/research/self-flow)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### ARC Prize Foundation — ARC-AGI-3 (Mar 26, 2026)

ARC Prize launched ARC-AGI-3, an interactive agentic reasoning benchmark of turn-based puzzle games designed to test human-like generalization in novel abstract environments. Humans hit a 100% pass rate while top frontier models score under 1%, which the panel welcomed as a healthy reality check against AGI-is-here rhetoric and easy score inflation.

**<1%** ARC-AGI-3 frontier model scores · **100%** Human completion on ARC-AGI-3

- [ARC Prize announcement (X)](https://x.com/arcprize/status/2036860080541589529)
- [ARC Prize site](https://arcprize.org)
- Podcast coverage: [AGI is here? Jensen says yes, ARC-AGI-3 says AI scores under 1%](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-26-2026#sec-arc-agi-3-launch-and-test)

### MarginLab — Claude Code tracker (Mar 5, 2026)

MarginLab's public Claude Code tracker surfaced measurable degradation in Opus 4.6 performance, discussed in the evals and benchmarks roundup. The tracker continuously evaluates Claude Code behavior over time, making silent model regressions visible.

- [MarginLab Claude Code tracker](https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026)

### Peter Gostev — BullShit Bench (Mar 5, 2026)

Peter Gostev published BullShit Bench, a new community evaluation flagged in the week's evals and benchmarks roundup. It measures how models handle nonsense or unfounded claims rather than raw capability.

- [BullShit Bench announcement](https://x.com/petergostev/status/2028988993690313011)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026)

### Weights & Biases — Wolf Bench (Mar 5, 2026)

Wolfram Ravenwolf gave an early preview of Wolf Bench, a Terminal Bench-based evaluation framework from Weights & Biases that reports four metrics (average, best run, ceiling, and consistent floor) instead of a single score. It treats harness differences (Terminal Bench vs Claude Code vs OpenClaw) as a first-class factor and publishes benchmark cost and transparency details.

- [Wolf Bench](http://wolfbench.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 5 - GPT 5.4 is here, Anthropic supply chain risk, Qwen 3.5 small & leadership drama, wolfbench & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-05-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz-wolf-bench)

## Acquisitions

### OpenAI — Astral (uv, Ruff, ty) (Mar 19, 2026)

OpenAI acquired Astral, the company behind the uv Python package manager, Ruff, and ty, with the team joining Codex specifically — OpenAI's third acquisition of the month. The panel drew the parallel to Anthropic buying Bun for TypeScript infrastructure: OpenAI now owns core Python tooling for the code its agents write. The tools remain open source and forkable.

- [Astral blog](https://astral.sh/blog/openai)
- [Astral on X](https://twitter.com/astral_sh/status/2034622016049860869)
- [Charlie Marsh on X](https://twitter.com/charliermarsh/status/2034623222570783141)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-openai-acquires-astral-uv)

## Also Released

### Hugging Face — State of Open Source Spring 2026 Report (Mar 19, 2026)

Hugging Face published its Spring 2026 State of Open Source report showing China surpassing the US in number of LLMs for the first time, with Chinese models taking 41% of all downloads. Alibaba's Qwen family crossed 1 billion total downloads (about 1 million per day), overtaking Llama as the most downloaded model family, on a platform now hosting 11M users and 2M+ models.

- [Hugging Face blog](https://huggingface.co/blog/state-of-open-source-2026)
- [Irene Solaiman on X](https://x.com/IreneSolaiman/status/2033947953963180515)
- [AeonCorridor on X](https://x.com/AeonCorridor/status/2033997427187868141)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-hugging-face-state-of-open-source)

### NVIDIA — GR LPX (Rubin NVL72 + Groq 3) (Mar 19, 2026)

NVIDIA's GTC hardware reveal integrates the new Groq 3 chip (gen 2 was never publicly seen) into Rubin NVL72 servers via the GR LPX system. Claims include 3x tokens-per-watt efficiency at baseline, up to 30x at higher throughput, and 1000+ tokens/sec on a 2T-parameter frontier model with 400K context — performance the current Blackwell generation can't reach at any price.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Opus 1M, Jensen declares OpenClaw as the new Linux, GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano, Minimax 2.7, Composer 2 & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-19-2026#sec-nvidia-gr-lpx-and-groq-chip)

### Eon Systems — Fruit Fly Brain Connectome Simulation (Mar 13, 2026)

Eon Systems uploaded the complete fruit fly brain connectome — 140,000 neurons and 50M+ synapses — into a MuJoCo physics simulator, achieving 91% behavioral accuracy. Notably no ML or LLMs were used: it is pure connectome simulation. The advisory board includes George Church, Stephen Wolfram, and Anders Sandberg, marking a milestone for whole-brain emulation.

**140,000** Neurons in the uploaded fruit fly brain connectome · **50M+** Synapses in the fruit fly brain connectome · **91%** Behavioral accuracy of the simulated fruit fly brain

- [Eon Systems on X](https://x.com/michaelandregg/status/2030764512488677736)
- [eon.systems](https://eon.systems)
- [FlyWire connectome data](https://flywire.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI — 3rd BirthdAI: Singularity Updates Begin with Auto Researcher, Uploaded Brains, OpenClaw Mania & NVIDIA's $26B Bet on Open Source](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2026#sec-chapter-4)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in March 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-03), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-03 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in February 2026

> 57 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-02


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 3.5 (Feb 26, 2026)

Alibaba released the Qwen 3.5 family of open-weight models, headlined by Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, a 35B model with only 3B active parameters that outperforms their previous 235B flagship. Variants include a 122B-A10B and a dense 27B, with the panel highlighting the hybrid state-space (Mamba-layer) architecture and strong practical coding and agent performance at a tiny active-parameter footprint.

**35B / 3B active** Qwen 3.5 Medium

- [Qwen announcement on X](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2026339351530188939)
- [Qwen3.5-35B-A3B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B)
- [Qwen3.5-122B-A10B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B)
- [Qwen 3.5 blog post](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.5)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-open-source-qwen-35-liquid-lfm-2)

### Google DeepMind — Nano Banana 2 (Feb 26, 2026)

Google DeepMind announced Nano Banana 2 during the show, a Flash-quality tier of its image model line. Alex broke in mid-TLDR to describe near-Pro image quality at roughly half the price, plus a new image search capability.

- [Google DeepMind announcement on X](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2027051577899380991)
- [Nano Banana page](https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/nano-banana/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Liquid AI — LFM2-24B-A2B (Feb 26, 2026)

Liquid AI released LFM2-24B-A2B, a 24B mixture-of-experts model with only 2.3B active parameters that runs on consumer laptops. The panel highlighted its speed and surprisingly strong non-coding reasoning, reinforcing the trend of efficient low-active-parameter open models for local use.

- [Liquid AI announcement on X](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2026301771539202269)
- [LFM2-24B-A2B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2-24B-A2B)
- [Liquid AI blog post](https://www.liquid.ai/blog/lfm2-24b-a2b)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-open-source-qwen-35-liquid-lfm-2)

### OpenAI — gpt-audio-1.5 & gpt-realtime-1.5 (Feb 26, 2026)

OpenAI shipped gpt-audio-1.5 and gpt-realtime-1.5, updated audio and realtime voice models available through its platform. The release was covered in the week's voice and audio roundup.

- [Release noted on X](https://x.com/swishfever/status/2026000424918982837)
- [OpenAI models docs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/models)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Perplexity — pplx-embed (Feb 26, 2026)

Perplexity released pplx-embed, a family of state-of-the-art embedding models built for web-scale retrieval. The models are available on Hugging Face and through Perplexity's API with quickstart docs.

- [pplx-embed research blog](https://research.perplexity.ai/articles/pplx-embed-state-of-the-art-embedding-models-for-web-scale-retrieval)
- [pplx-embed Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/perplexity-ai/pplx-embed)
- [Perplexity embeddings API quickstart](https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/embeddings/quickstart)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tldr-weekly-news-roundup)

### Quiver — Arrow 1.0 (Feb 26, 2026)

Quiver released Arrow 1.0, pitched as solving SVG generation. It was included in the week's AI art and diffusion roundup as a notable niche release for vector graphics.

- [Arrow 1.0 demo on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/2026809860101468182?s=20)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (Feb 19, 2026)

Alibaba released Qwen3.5-397B-A17B, billed as the first open-weight native multimodal MoE model, with 397B total parameters, just 17B active, 512 experts, and 262K native context extendable to 1M. It delivers 8.6-19x faster inference than Qwen3-Max and continues Qwen's strength in multilingual and medical tasks, scoring 52.5% on Terminal Bench, third place among open-source models. Nisten found coding still trails GLM-5.

**397B** Qwen 3.5 Parameters

- [Qwen 3.5 announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2023331062433153103)
- [Qwen3.5-397B-A17B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-qwen-35-release)

### Anthropic — Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Feb 19, 2026)

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 4.6, its most capable Sonnet ever, scoring 79.6% on SWE-Bench Verified, nearly matching Opus 4.6 at Sonnet pricing of $3/$15 per million tokens. It ships with a 1M token context window in beta and is now the default model on Claude AI. In blind Claude Code testing, users preferred Sonnet 4.6 over the previous Opus 4.5 59% of the time, and it beats the previous Gemini 3 Pro on most benchmarks.

**79.6%** SWE-Bench Verified

- [Claude Sonnet 4.6 announcement (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2023817132581208353)
- [Anthropic blog: Claude Sonnet 4.6](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6)
- [Claude Sonnet page](https://www.anthropic.com/claude/sonnet)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-claude-sonnet-46)

### ByteDance — Seed 2.0 (Feb 19, 2026)

ByteDance released Seed 2.0, a frontier multimodal LLM family with Pro, Lite, Mini, and Code variants that rivals GPT-5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5 at 73-84% lower pricing. Its video understanding surpasses the human benchmark at 77% vs 73%. At 84% cheaper than Opus 4.5 with near-comparable quality, the panel called it a compelling option for price-conscious developers.

- [Seed 2.0 announcement (X)](https://x.com/QuanquanGu/status/2022560162406707642)
- [Doubao team model page](https://team.doubao.com/en/models)
- [ByteDance-Seed on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ByteDance-Seed)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-bytedance-seed-2)

### Cohere Labs — Tiny Aya (Feb 19, 2026)

Cohere Labs released Tiny Aya, a 3.35B-parameter multilingual model family supporting 70+ languages that is small enough to run locally on phones. It extends Cohere's Aya line of open multilingual models, bringing broad language coverage to on-device deployments.

- [Tiny Aya announcement (X)](https://x.com/Cohere_Labs/status/2023699450309275680)
- [Tiny Aya collection on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/CohereLabs/tiny-aya)
- [Tiny Aya Global on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/CohereLabs/tiny-aya-global)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-open-source-qwen-cohere)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3.1 Pro (Feb 19, 2026)

Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro minutes before the show, claiming 2.5x better abstract reasoning and improved coding and agentic capabilities at the same price point as its predecessor. It scores 44% on Humanity's Last Exam, 77% on ARC-AGI without a custom harness, and 68 on Terminal Bench, putting it at or near state of the art alongside Opus 4.6. In Nisten's live vibe-coding test it was blazingly fast but less polished than Opus 4.6 and Codex output.

**44%** Humanities Last Exam · **77%** ARC-AGI

- [Gemini 3.1 Pro announcement (X)](https://x.com/_philschmid/status/2024516444847776209)
- [Google DeepMind blog: Gemini 3.1 Pro update](https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-3-1-pro-update/)
- [Try it in Google AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-gemini-31-breaking)

### Google DeepMind — Lyria 3 (Feb 19, 2026)

Google DeepMind launched Lyria 3, its most advanced AI music generation model, now available in the Gemini app. It generates 32-second high-fidelity music tracks with creative controls and can compose music from uploaded images. Google also published a prompt guide covering vocals, lyrics, and different styles.

- [Lyria 3 announcement (X)](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2024153948488118513)
- [Lyria on Google DeepMind](https://deepmind.google/technologies/lyria/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-google-lyria-3)

### xAI — Grok 4.20 (Feb 19, 2026)

xAI released Grok 4.20, a multi-agent system where four 500B-parameter agents collaborate in a multi-agent UI, with a $300/month Heavy tier scaling to 16 agents. No benchmarks or evals were released with the drop. The panel found it underwhelming for coding and day-to-day agent work but still top tier for deep research thanks to xAI's RAG over X data; Grok 4.1 Fast remains #8 on OpenRouter by API usage.

**500B×4** Grok 4 20 Architecture

- [Grok 4.20 on X](https://x.com/XFreeze/status/2031674726398230692)
- [xAI model docs](https://docs.x.ai/docs/models)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-grok-4-20)

### Zyphra — ZUNA (Feb 19, 2026)

Zyphra released ZUNA, a 380M-parameter open-source BCI foundation model that translates EEG brain signals into text, reconstructing clinical-grade brain signals from sparse, noisy data. Dubbed 'thought to text' by the community, it works with roughly $500 non-invasive EEG headsets, likely needs personalized training per user, and is small enough to run in real time on a consumer gaming GPU. It is Apache licensed.

- [ZUNA announcement (X)](https://x.com/ZyphraAI/status/2024114248020898015)
- [Zyphra blog: ZUNA](https://www.zyphra.com/post/zuna)
- [ZUNA on GitHub](https://github.com/Zyphra/ZUNA)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-zuna-bci)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen-Image-2.0 (Feb 12, 2026)

Alibaba's Qwen team launched Qwen-Image-2.0, a 7B-parameter image generation model with native 2K resolution output and superior text rendering. Available to try on chat.qwen.ai.

- [Alibaba Qwen announcement on X](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2021137577311600949)
- [Try it on Qwen Chat](https://chat.qwen.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026)

### ByteDance — Seedance 2.0 (Feb 12, 2026)

ByteDance launched Seedance 2.0, a unified multimodal video generation model that accepts up to 9 images, 3 videos, and 3 audio clips as references and produces 15-second multi-shot clips with native stereo audio and strong character consistency (a 45-second internal test mode also exists). The panel compared the quality jump to seeing Sora for the first time. Available on the BytePlus platform.

- [Alex's demo thread on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/2021967972055842893)
- [Official launch blog](https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/official-launch-of-seedance-2-0)
- [Seedance 2.0 announcement page](https://seed.bytedance.com/en/seedance2_0)
- [Seedance 2.0 in CapCut on X](https://x.com/alisaqqt/status/2024914134513713403)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-seedance-2)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3 Deep Think (Feb 12, 2026)

Google dropped an upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think mid-show, hitting 84% on ARC-AGI 2 — the biggest single jump in the benchmark's history, up from Opus 4.6's 68% set just one week earlier. It also scored 48.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without tools, taking state of the art on both.

**84%** ARC-AGI 2

- [Sundar Pichai announcement on X](https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/2022002445027873257/photo/1)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-breaking-gemini3-deep-think)

### MiniMax — MiniMax M-2.5 (Feb 12, 2026)

MiniMax dropped M-2.5 thirty minutes before the show: a 200B-total, 10B-active open-weights model scoring 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, approaching Opus 4.6 at roughly 1/20th the cost (~15 cents per task with a 57% win rate over Opus). Trained with MiniMax's decoupled Forge RL framework and optimized for end-to-end task time with fewer tool calls and thinking tokens. Senior researcher Olive Song joined live and revealed the model was still training — they cut a checkpoint for early release.

**80.2%** SWE-Bench Verified · **15¢** Cost per task

- [MiniMax M2.5 benchmarks on X](https://x.com/Lentils80/status/2021971442431406092)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-breaking-minimax-m25)

### OpenAI — GPT 5.3 Codex Spark (Feb 12, 2026)

OpenAI released GPT 5.3 Codex Spark, a smaller Codex variant built for real-time coding, served on Cerebras hardware — OpenAI's first model on Cerebras — with reported speeds of over 1000 tokens/sec. Available to ChatGPT Pro users in the Codex app, CLI, and IDE extension. It broke during the show as the second breaking-news drop of the episode.

**100 tps** Codex Spark speed

- [Sam Altman announcement on X](https://x.com/sama/status/2022011797524582726)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-breaking-gpt53-codex-spark)

### Zhipu AI (Z.ai) — GLM-5 (Feb 12, 2026)

Z.ai released GLM-5, a 744B-parameter MoE model (40B active) trained on 28.5 trillion tokens that takes the #1 open-source ranking for agentic coding with 77.8% SWE-bench Verified. It introduces the SLIM asynchronous RL framework for post-training, adopts DeepSeek's sparse attention to cut deployment cost, and was trained on Huawei chips rather than NVIDIA. Lou from Z.ai joined the show live and summed it up as bigger, faster, better, and cheaper.

**744B** GLM-5 Parameters · **28.5T** Training tokens

- [Z.ai announcement on X](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2021638634739527773)
- [GLM-5 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Zai-org/GLM-5)
- [W&B Inference day-zero support](https://x.com/wandb/status/2021757577563189548)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-interview-lou-zai-glm5)

### ACE Step — ACE-Step 1.5 (Feb 5, 2026)

ACE-Step 1.5 is an MIT-licensed AI music generator that produces full songs in under 10 seconds on consumer GPUs and runs on a MacBook. The panel demoed it live via Pinocchio, generating a ThursdAI song on the spot, and it is available for one-click install.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/AmbsdOP/status/2018735590930518175)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/ace-step/ACE-Step)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ACE-Step/ACE-Step-v1-3.5B)
- [Project page](https://ace-step.github.io/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-ace-step-music)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-Coder-Next (Feb 5, 2026)

Alibaba's Qwen3-Coder-Next is an 80B MoE coding agent model with only 3B active parameters that scores 70.6% on SWE-Bench Verified and 44% on the much harder SWE-Bench Pro. It was trained on 7.5T tokens with 20,000 parallel RL environments and runs under 48GB of RAM with GGUF quantization, making near-frontier agentic coding feasible on local hardware.

**70.6%** SWE-Bench Verified · **44%** SWE-Bench Pro

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2018718453570707465)
- [Qwen blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3-coder-next)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-coder-next?spm=a2ty_o06.30285417.0.0.3bdec921lCIW9G)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-qwen3-coder-next)

### Ant Group — LingBot-World (Feb 5, 2026)

Ant Group released LingBot-World, an open-source world model that generates 10-minute playable environments at 16fps. It positions open weights as a direct challenger to Google's closed Genie 3 in interactive world generation.

- [X thread](https://x.com/dr_cintas/status/2017650068019368119)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/robbyant/lingbot-world-base-cam)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.6 (Feb 5, 2026)

Anthropic dropped Opus 4.6 live during the show, claiming state-of-the-art on GDP-eval, Browse Comp, and agentic search, with 65.4% on Terminal Bench and 99% on TAU Bench MCP tool use. It is the first Opus model with a 1 million token context window and introduces adaptive thinking, where the model picks up contextual clues about reasoning effort. Pricing matches Opus 4.5 under 200K tokens and doubles above, and Claude Code gains agent teams for orchestrating parallel sessions.

**1M** Context tokens

- [X announcement](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2019467372609040752)
- [Anthropic blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-breaking-opus-46)

### InternLM (Shanghai AI Lab) — Intern-S1-Pro (Feb 5, 2026)

InternLM released Intern-S1-Pro, a 1 trillion parameter open-source MoE model targeting SOTA scientific reasoning across chemistry, biology, materials, and earth sciences. The panel noted it beats frontier models on science benchmarks, a massive compute investment for an open release.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/intern_lm/status/2019042113305108641)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/internlm/Intern-S1-Pro)
- [Arxiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15763)
- [ModelScope](https://modelscope.cn/models/internlm/Intern-S1-Pro)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-open-source-llms)

### Kling AI — Kling 3.0 (Feb 5, 2026)

Kuaishou's Kling 3.0 launched as an all-in-one AI video creation engine with native multimodal generation, 15-second multi-shot sequences, built-in audio, and character consistency across scenes. Alongside Grok Imagine, it marks the week native audio and lip sync became table stakes for video models.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Kling_ai/status/2019064918960668819)
- [Kling AI](https://klingai.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-video-grok-kling)

### Mistral AI — Voxtral Transcribe 2 (Feb 5, 2026)

Mistral AI launched Voxtral Transcribe 2, state-of-the-art speech-to-text with sub-200ms latency, native diarization support, and open weights under Apache 2.0. The panel called it the first model to dethrone Whisper after roughly three years, and Alex used it to transcribe this very episode.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/2019068826097213953)
- [Mistral blog](https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral-transcribe-2/)
- [Docs](https://docs.mistral.ai/capabilities/audio/)
- [Demo](https://inworld-mistral-demo.inworld.ai/index.html)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-voice-audio-vox-duplex)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.3-Codex (Feb 5, 2026)

One hour after Opus 4.6, OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex, billed as the first model instrumental in developing itself — the Codex team used early versions to debug its own training and manage its own deployment. It scores 73% on Terminal Bench 2.0, a 10-point gap over Opus 4.6, while running queries 25% faster and more token-efficiently than its predecessor, with improved mid-task steerability.

**73%** Terminal Bench 2.0 · **25%** Speed improvement

- [Sam Altman announcement on X](https://x.com/sama/status/2019474754529321247)
- [OpenAIDevs announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2026379092661289260)
- [GPT-5.3-Codex model docs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5.3-codex)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-breaking-gpt53-codex)

### OpenBMB — MiniCPM-o 4.5 (Feb 5, 2026)

OpenBMB released MiniCPM-o 4.5, the first open-source full-duplex omni-modal LLM that can see, listen, and speak simultaneously. It can listen while speaking and even interrupt the user, bringing real-time conversational behavior to open weights.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenBMB/status/2018741614257307678)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM-o-4_5)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM-o)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-voice-audio-vox-duplex)

### StepFun — Step 3.5 Flash (Feb 5, 2026)

StepFun released Step 3.5 Flash, a 196B sparse MoE model with only 11B active parameters, claiming frontier-level reasoning while generating at 100-350 tokens per second. It continues the trend of sparse Chinese MoE models delivering high speed at low active parameter counts.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/StepFun_ai/status/2018370831538180167)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step-3.5-Flash-Int4)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-open-source-llms)

### xAI — Grok Imagine 1.0 (Feb 5, 2026)

xAI launched Grok Imagine 1.0 with 10-second 720p video generation, native audio, and lip sync, taking the #1 spot on the Artificial Analysis text-to-video arena. Generation costs roughly $0.42 per 10-second clip and an API is available.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/xai/status/2018164753810764061)
- [Grok](https://grok.com/)
- [Artificial Analysis leaderboard](https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=Leaderboard)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-video-grok-kling)

### Zhipu AI (Z.ai) — GLM-OCR (Feb 5, 2026)

Z.ai released GLM-OCR, a tiny 0.9B parameter document understanding model that achieves the #1 ranking on OmniDocBench V1.5. It shows that strong OCR and document parsing no longer require large models.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2018520052941656385)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-OCR)
- [Announcement](https://ocr.z.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-open-source-llms)

## Products & Apps

### Cognition Labs — Devin 2.2 (Feb 26, 2026)

Cognition shipped Devin 2.2, an autonomous coding agent that can use a computer and browser to verify and fix its own work, plus a free public Devin Review workflow for PR review and scheduled/automated sessions. Nader Dabit framed the release as two years of platform maturity converging with stronger models, letting non-engineers fix issues directly by just asking Devin.

- [Cognition announcement on X](https://x.com/cognition/status/2026343816521994339?s=20)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-interview-nader-dabit-cognition-devin-22)

### Nous Research — Nous Research Agent (Feb 26, 2026)

Nous Research announced a research agent, joining the wave of lab-built agentic tools shipped this week. It was covered in the roundup of new agent products alongside Cursor cloud agents and Perplexity Computer.

- [Nous Research announcement on X](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2026758999488528639)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Perplexity — Perplexity Computer (Feb 26, 2026)

Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, an agentic computer product announced via its blog. It was discussed as part of the week's convergence on agent harnesses, automations, and cloud-based agent workflows across labs.

- [Introducing Perplexity Computer (blog)](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/introducing-perplexity-computer)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Taalas — ChatJimmy (baked-weights chip demo) (Feb 26, 2026)

Taalas published a live demo (chatjimmy.ai) showing Llama 3 8B running at 15,691 tokens per second on a chip with weights baked directly into the hardware. The panel called it a 10x speed-class jump that points at chip-level innovation compressing inference costs and iteration cycles.

**15,000 tok/s** Taalas Demo Throughput

- [ChatJimmy demo](https://chatjimmy.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-seedance-2-taalas-15k-tokens-sec-demo)

### Dreamer — Dreamer (Feb 19, 2026)

Dreamer launched its beta, a full-stack platform for building and discovering agentic apps with no-code AI. It aims to let non-developers assemble and share agent-powered applications.

- [Dreamer beta announcement (X)](https://x.com/dreamer/status/2023791680366039135)
- [Dreamer](https://dreamer.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026)

### Moltbook — Moltbook (Feb 5, 2026)

Moltbook launched as a social network for AI agents, part of an exploding 'agentic internet' that now includes agent equivalents of YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, 4chan, and even a church. Agents on these networks were observed discussing creating encrypted languages humans cannot read, and the panel warned against letting your agents loose on them.

- [Moltbook](https://www.moltbook.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-agentic-internet)

### OpenAI — Codex App (Feb 5, 2026)

OpenAI shipped Codex as a dedicated Mac app, a command center for running multiple AI coding agents in parallel. Features include work trees for parallel project branches, scheduled automations, a skills marketplace with Cloudflare, Vercel, Figma, Notion, and Linear integrations, inline diff review with per-line commenting, and cloud hand-off. OpenAI granted a free month of access to all users including the free tier, and doubled rate limits for all tiers for two months.

- [VB announcement on X](https://x.com/reach_vb/status/2018385536616956209)
- [Codex app](https://codex.openai.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026#sec-interview-vb-openai-codex)

### OpenAI — OpenAI Frontier (Feb 5, 2026)

OpenAI launched Frontier, an enterprise platform to build, deploy, and manage AI agents as 'AI coworkers'. It targets companies that want to operationalize agents across their organizations.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2019413712772411528)
- [OpenAI blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-frontier/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 5 - Opus 4.6 was #1 for ONE HOUR before GPT 5.3 Codex, Voxtral transcription, Codex app, Qwen Coder Next & the Agentic Internet](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-05-2026)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Claude Code Remote Control & Memory (Feb 26, 2026)

Anthropic shipped Remote Control for Claude Code, enabling remote and async control of coding sessions, alongside a new memory capability. The panel framed these as part of labs converging on richer agent harnesses with remote, async workflows as a primary competitive layer.

- [Claude announcement on X](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2026418433911603668)
- [Remote Control docs](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/remote-control)
- [Memory announcement on X](https://x.com/trq212/status/2027109375765356723)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Anthropic — Claude Cowork Automations (Feb 26, 2026)

Claude Cowork added automations, cron-job-style scheduled agent runs, in the same week OpenAI's Codex gained equivalent automation support. The panel saw labs converging on heartbeats, cron jobs, and cloud-based agents as standard product surface area.

- [Claude Cowork automations on X](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2026720870631354429)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Cursor — Cloud Agents (Feb 26, 2026)

Cursor launched cloud agents, moving agentic coding work off the local machine into remote, async sessions. The panel highlighted Cursor's cloud agents and UI demos as important progress for frontend development workflows.

- [Lee Robinson demo on X](https://x.com/leerob/status/2026369424450523348)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Weights & Biases — W&B Inference: MiniMax 2.5 & Kimi K2.5 (Feb 26, 2026)

Weights & Biases added MiniMax M2.5 and Kimi K2.5 to its CoreWeave-backed Inference service. The panel emphasized price/performance, with MiniMax 2.5 presented as roughly 10x cheaper than premium alternatives in some tiers and Kimi K2.5 praised for practical function calling and image-in-loop use cases.

- [MiniMax M2.5 on W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference/coreweave/cw_MiniMaxAI_MiniMax-M2.5)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz-kimi-25-minimax-25-on-wb-inference)

### Weights & Biases — Kimi K2.5 on W&B Inference (Feb 19, 2026)

Weights & Biases launched Kimi K2.5 on its inference service, making Moonshot AI's model available to W&B users. In Wolfram's Terminal Bench deep dive for W&B, Kimi K2.5 achieved a 67.4% ceiling score across multiple runs, among the strongest open-model results he measured.

- [W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feb12)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-terminal-bench-deep-dive)

### OpenAI — Deep Research (GPT-5.2) (Feb 12, 2026)

OpenAI upgraded Deep Research to run on GPT-5.2, adding app integrations, site-specific searches, and real-time collaboration. Part of the week's rapid-fire big-lab announcements covered in the TLDR rundown.

- [OpenAI announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2021299935678026168)
- [OpenAI Deep Research blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-tldr)

### Weights & Biases — W&B Inference (GLM-5 & Kimi K2.5) (Feb 12, 2026)

Weights & Biases launched day-zero GLM-5 support on its CoreWeave-powered W&B Inference service, alongside Kimi K2.5, with MiniMax 2.5 coming soon. Alex announced $50 in free credits for listeners to test the new open-weights models.

- [W&B announcement on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/2021757577563189548?s=20)
- [W&B Inference](https://wandb.ai/inference?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feb12)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

## APIs & Platforms

### Google (Chrome) — WebMCP (Chrome 146) (Feb 12, 2026)

Chrome 146 shipped WebMCP, a native browser API that lets AI agents directly interact with web services. It brings Model Context Protocol-style agent access into the browser itself, a notable primitive for the agentic web.

- [WebMCP coverage on X](https://x.com/firt/status/2020903127428313461)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026)

## Dev Tools

### LM Studio — LMLink (Feb 26, 2026)

LM Studio launched LMLink, which lets you use your locally hosted models from anywhere via Tailscale. It extends the local-model story so that on-device inference is reachable from any of your machines.

- [LMLink page](https://lmstudio.ai/link)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-tools-agentic-engineering-claude-code-cursor-devin)

### Ryan Carson — AntFarm (Feb 12, 2026)

Co-host Ryan Carson released AntFarm, a tool for coordinating teams of coding agents. It targets the missing primitives for managing multiple agents that the panel discussed during the agent-psychosis segment.

- [AntFarm announcement on X](https://x.com/ryancarson/status/2021973271240147332?s=20)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026)

## Papers & Research

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.6 Sabotage Risk Report (Feb 12, 2026)

Anthropic released a sabotage risk report for Claude Opus 4.6, preemptively meeting ASL-4 safety standards for autonomous AI R&D. The report evaluates the model's potential for sabotage-style behaviors as capabilities scale.

- [Anthropic announcement on X](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2021397952791707696)
- [Sabotage evaluations research page](https://www.anthropic.com/research/sabotage-evaluations)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026#sec-tldr)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Agentica — ARC-AGI-3 public set result (Feb 26, 2026)

Agentica published a claim of solving all public ARC-AGI-3 tasks, adding to the week's theme of benchmark saturation. The panel discussed it alongside METR and ARC-AGI-2 results as part of weighing signal versus noise in headline benchmark leaps.

- [Agentica claim on X](https://x.com/agenticasdk/status/2026011339718849020)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-evals-benchmarks-metr-arc-agi-swe-bench)

### Confluence Labs — ARC-AGI-2 SOTA result (Feb 26, 2026)

Confluence Labs emerged from stealth with a 97.9% state-of-the-art result on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, publishing code on GitHub. The panel read it as a major signal that ARC-AGI-2 is near saturation, part of a broader pattern of benchmarks getting solved faster than expected.

**97.9%** ARC-AGI-2

- [Y Combinator post on X](https://x.com/ycombinator/status/2026084664503603649)
- [Confluence Labs ARC-AGI-2 GitHub repo](https://github.com/confluence-labs/arc-agi-2)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-evals-benchmarks-metr-arc-agi-swe-bench)

### METR — Time Horizon Benchmark (Feb 26, 2026)

METR's updated Time Horizon benchmark shows Claude Opus 4.6 completing tasks equivalent to roughly 14.5 hours of expert human work, with the autonomy doubling time now cited at 49 days. The panel treated this as the week's strongest evidence that agent capability growth has entered a visibly faster phase.

**14.5h** METR Time Horizon · **49 days** Autonomy Doubling Time

- [Peter Wildeford thread on X](https://x.com/peterwildeford/status/2024934981290918286)
- [METR website](https://metr.org/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 26 - Approaching singularity](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-26-2026#sec-evals-benchmarks-metr-arc-agi-swe-bench)

## Funding

### Entire — Entire Checkpoints (Feb 12, 2026)

Entire raised a $60M seed round to build an open-source developer platform for AI agent workflows. Alongside the funding it shipped its first open-source release, Checkpoints, available on GitHub.

- [Entire announcement on X](https://x.com/EntireHQ/status/2021254920410931222)
- [Entire CLI on GitHub](https://github.com/entireio/cli)
- [Entire.dev](https://entire.dev)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Open source just pulled up to Opus 4.6 — at 1/20th the price](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-12-2026)

## Acquisitions

### OpenAI — OpenClaw acqui-hire (Feb 19, 2026)

OpenAI acqui-hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral OpenClaw agent, in what the panel speculated might be the first single-founder billion-dollar deal. Yam Peleg broke the news on the show, calling Steinberger 'the goat'. The move lands the most popular third-party agent harness builder inside OpenAI, amid a week where Anthropic's terms changes pushed agent users toward OpenAI subscriptions.

- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-intro-highlights)

## Also Released

### Ryan Carson — Code Factory (Feb 19, 2026)

Ryan Carson published his viral Code Factory article, a blueprint for fully automated code generation, review, and deployment inspired by OpenAI's Harness Engineering post. The setup chains GitHub Actions, Reptile code review, CI gates, a risk-classification system for high-risk file changes, and a self-healing loop where Codex fixes its own PR issues until all checks pass. He says it takes a week-plus of setup but unlocks massive throughput.

- [Code Factory thread (X)](https://x.com/ryancarson/status/2023452909883609111)
- [OpenAI: Harness Engineering](https://openai.com/index/harness-engineering/)
- Podcast coverage: [📅 ThursdAI - Feb 19 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Drops LIVE, Sonnet 4.6 Closes Gap, OpenClaw Goes to OpenAI](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-19-2026#sec-code-factory)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in February 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-02), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-02 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in January 2026

> 58 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-01


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Tongyi Lab) — Z-Image (Jan 29, 2026)

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab released Z-Image, a new image generation model, with support landing in the open-source DiffSynth-Studio toolkit on GitHub. Covered in the AI Art segment alongside HunyuanImage 3.0.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Ali_TongyiLab/status/2016186674531758285)
- [GitHub (DiffSynth-Studio)](https://github.com/modelscope/DiffSynth-Studio)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-hunyuan-image3)

### Arcee AI — Trinity Large (Jan 29, 2026)

Arcee AI's Trinity Large is a 400B-parameter MOE with 13B active parameters, trained on 17T tokens across 2000 B300 GPUs in 33 days for $20M. It has 512K native context (twice Kimi K2.5), is free on OpenRouter until February 2026, and the panel called it the largest Western open-source lab model.

**400B** Arcee Trinity Large · **512K** Trinity native context

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/arcee_ai/status/2016278017572495505)
- [Blog](https://arcee.ai/blog/trinity-large)
- [Hugging Face (Preview)](https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Trinity-Large-Preview)
- [Hugging Face (Base)](https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Trinity-Large-Base)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-open-source-arcee-trinity)

### Decart — Lucy 2.0 (Jan 29, 2026)

Lucy 2.0, a real-time video generation model, was discussed in the AI Art segment. The episode covered its real-time video capabilities.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-lucy-2-realtime-video)

### Google DeepMind — Genie 3 (Project Genie) (Jan 29, 2026)

Google DeepMind's Genie 3 generates interactive, controllable 3D worlds in real time at 24 frames per second, demoed live on the show with a spaceship exploration and paint persistence on walls. It ships alongside SIMA 2, a self-improving game-playing agent built on Genie 3, and is available to Gemini Ultra subscribers in the US with a one-minute session limit.

**24 fps** Genie 3 frame rate

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2016919756440240479)
- [Project Genie](https://labs.google/projectgenie)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-breaking-genie3)

### Jan AI — Jan v3 (Jan 29, 2026)

Jan v3 is a 4B-parameter open model optimized for local inference, hitting 132 tokens/sec with a 262K context window and a 40% improvement on coding. The Jan desktop app it powers has reached 5M downloads.

**4B** Jan v3 parameters

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/jandotai/status/2016019981541245353)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/janhq/Jan-v3-4B-base-instruct)
- [Hugging Face (GGUF)](https://huggingface.co/janhq/Jan-v3-4B-base-instruct-gguf)
- [Jan.ai](https://jan.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-jan-v3)

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K2.5 (Jan 29, 2026)

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 takes the open-source crown, becoming the most-used model on OpenRouter and topping open-source leaderboards. The panel highlighted its strong agentic coding performance and tool use.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2016024049869324599)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-open-source-kimi-k25)

### NVIDIA — PersonaPlex-7B (Jan 29, 2026)

NVIDIA released PersonaPlex-7B, an open voice/audio model published on Hugging Face with code on GitHub. Listed in the week's Voice & Audio releases.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/HuggingModels/status/2014788077924040729)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/PersonaPlex)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/NVIDIA/personaplex)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — HunyuanImage 3.0-Instruct (Jan 29, 2026)

Tencent's Hunyuan team launched HunyuanImage 3.0-Instruct, an instruction-tuned version of its image generation model. Covered briefly in the AI Art segment alongside other new image models this week.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2015635861833167074)
- [Follow-up (X)](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/2016356787361087615)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-hunyuan-image3)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-TTS (Jan 22, 2026)

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3-TTS, a full open-source text-to-speech family under Apache 2 that dropped 30 minutes before the show. It spans 5 models from 0.6B to 1.7B parameters, with 97ms latency, voice cloning from just 3 seconds of audio, voice description prompting, and 10-language support.

**97ms** Latency

- [Qwen3-TTS announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2014326211913343303)
- [Qwen3-TTS on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-1.7B-Base)
- [Qwen3-TTS on GitHub](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-TTS)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-voice-audio-qwen3-tts)

### FlashLabs — Chroma 1.0 (Jan 22, 2026)

FlashLabs released Chroma 1.0, billed as the world's first open-source end-to-end real-time speech-to-speech model with voice cloning under 150ms latency. The 4B parameter model is built on Qwen 2.5 Omni and released under Apache 2; its live demo with RAG and document upload impressed the whole panel.

- [FlashLabs Chroma 1.0 announcement (X)](https://x.com/ModelScope2022/status/2014006971855466640)
- [FlashLabs Chroma-4B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/FlashLabs/Chroma-4B)
- [Chroma paper (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11141)
- [FlashLabs Voice Agents demo](https://www.flashlabs.ai/flashai-voice-agents)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-voice-audio-flashlabs-inworld)

### Inworld AI — TTS-1.5 (Jan 22, 2026)

Inworld AI launched TTS-1.5, a closed-source text-to-speech model claiming the #1 ranking with sub-250ms latency. Its headline is price: roughly $5 per million characters (about half a cent per minute) versus ElevenLabs' $120 per million characters.

- [Inworld AI TTS-1.5 announcement (X)](https://x.com/inworld_ai/status/2014020677343510629)
- [Inworld AI TTS playground](https://inworld.ai/tts)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-voice-audio-flashlabs-inworld)

### Liquid AI — LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking (Jan 22, 2026)

Liquid AI released LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking, a 1.2B parameter reasoning model that runs entirely on-device with under 900MB of memory. Its hybrid architecture with gated convolutions delivers 239 tokens/sec on an AMD CPU and 82 tokens/sec on a mobile NPU, making it practical for edge devices, Raspberry Pi, and older iPhones.

**1.2B** Parameters, under 900MB memory

- [LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking announcement (X)](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2013633347625324627)
- [LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking)
- [LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking on Liquid LEAP](https://leap.liquid.ai/models?model=lfm2.5-1.2b-thinking)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-lfm-25-thinking)

### Overworld — Waypoint-1 (Jan 22, 2026)

Overworld released Waypoint-1, a real-time AI world model that runs at 60fps on consumer GPUs. It generates interactive environments live, bringing world-model tech out of research demos and onto hardware people actually own.

- [Overworld Waypoint-1 announcement (X)](https://x.com/overworld_ai/status/2013673088748245188)
- [Overworld — official site](https://over.world/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026)

### Runway — Runway 4.5 (Jan 22, 2026)

Runway launched version 4.5 of its video generation model, adding image-to-video and audio support. It was mentioned in the week's news rundown as part of a busy week for vision and video releases.

- [Runway 4.5 launch (X)](https://x.com/runwayml/status/2014090404769976744)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-tldr-overview)

### Z.AI (Zhipu) — GLM-4.7-Flash (Jan 22, 2026)

Z.AI released GLM-4.7-Flash, a 30B parameter MoE model with only 3B active parameters, designed as the ultimate local coding and agent assistant. It hits 59% on SWE-Bench Verified (approaching Sonnet 4's 64%) and runs at 120 tokens/sec on a stock Mac Studio M3 Ultra, fast enough to run RALF autonomous coding loops even on CPU.

**59%** SWE-Bench Verified · **120 tps** Speed on Mac Studio M3 Ultra

- [GLM-4.7-Flash announcement (X)](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2013261304060866758)
- [GLM-4.7 Technical Blog](https://z.ai/blog/glm-4.7)
- [GLM-4.7-Flash on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-4.7-Flash)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-glm-47-flash)

### Black Forest Labs — Flux 2 Klein (Jan 15, 2026)

Wolfram broke the news mid-show: Black Forest Labs released Flux 2 Klein, a fast 4B/9B image generation model with open weights under Apache 2.0. It is designed for near-real-time editing and style iteration, and Alex used it minutes later in his live Claude Cowork demo.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026)

### Byte — M3 (Jan 15, 2026)

Byte released M3, a 235B parameter medical LLM fine-tuned from Qwen3 and licensed Apache 2.0. With only 22B active parameters, it is runnable at usable speeds on an M3 Ultra, and it claims to beat GPT 5.2 on HealthBench. Nisten suggested pairing it with smaller imaging models like MedGemma rather than treating them as substitutes.

**235B** M3 Medical LLM

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-open-source-ai-models)

### Google DeepMind — MedGemma 1.5 (Jan 15, 2026)

Google released MedGemma 1.5, a small (4B-class) open model for medical use cases, compact enough to run offline for medical imaging. The panel stressed it is a different model class from Byte's giant M3 medical LLM and that the two pair well together rather than replacing each other.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-medgemma)

### Meituan (LongCat) — LongCat Flash Thinking (Jan 15, 2026)

Meituan released LongCat Flash Thinking, an open-source reasoning MoE with 560B total parameters and only 27B active, under an MIT license. It continued the run of large sparse Chinese open-weights models offering frontier-style reasoning at low active-parameter cost.

**560B/27B** LongCat Flash

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026)

### Lightricks — LTX-2 (Jan 8, 2026)

Lightricks open-sourced LTX-2, billed as the first truly open audio-video generation model with synchronized audio and video output, releasing full training code alongside the weights. A distilled version is available to try on Replicate.

- [LTX-2 on GitHub](https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video)
- [LTX-2 Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03233)
- [LTX-2 on Replicate](https://replicate.com/lightricks/ltx-2-distilled)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026)

### Liquid AI — LFM 2.5 (Jan 8, 2026)

Liquid AI released LFM 2.5, a family of ~1.2B parameter on-device models spanning text, vision, and audio, announced at CES alongside AMD's Lisa Su. The models hit 239 tokens/sec on AMD CPU and 100 tokens/sec on iPhone 16 Pro Max, and include a revolutionary end-to-end audio model that skips the traditional ASR-LLM-TTS pipeline entirely, running in as little as 8GB of RAM.

- [Liquid AI LFM 2.5 on X](https://x.com/liquidai/status/2008385292244242942)
- [LFM 2.5 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/LiquidAI/LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-liquid-ai-lfm-25)

### MiroMind AI — MiroThinker 1.5 (Jan 8, 2026)

MiroMind AI released MiroThinker 1.5, a 30B parameter open source search agent that achieves 56.1% on BrowseComp and 66.8% on BrowseComp Chinese, outperforming trillion-parameter models. It introduces 'interactive scaling' as a third scaling dimension beyond parameters and context, and is a fine-tune of Qwen 3 Thinking with 147K open training samples.

- [MiroThinker 1.5 on X](https://x.com/miromind_ai/status/2008728943994826773)
- [MiroThinker 1.5 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/miromind-ai/MiroThinker-v1.5-30B)
- [MiroThinker on GitHub](https://github.com/MiroMindAI/MiroThinker)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-miro-thinker)

### Nous Research — NousCoder 14B (Jan 8, 2026)

Nous Research released NousCoder 14B, an open source competitive programming model that achieved a 7% jump on LiveCodeBench accuracy in just four days of RL training on 48 NVIDIA B200 GPUs. Training used 24,000 verifiable problems, and the release ships under a full Apache 2 license with training code and a benchmark harness.

- [NousCoder 14B on X](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/2008624474237923495)
- [NousCoder W&B Dashboard](https://api.wandb.ai/links/jli505/ksz3e9w6)
- [NousCoder Atropos on GitHub](https://github.com/NousResearch/atropos/pull/296)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-zhipu-ipo-nuscoder)

### NVIDIA — Alpha Mayo (Jan 8, 2026)

NVIDIA announced Alpha Mayo at CES, a family of open source reasoning-based self-driving AI models. The models perform end-to-end autonomous driving with explicit reasoning steps, like identifying jaywalkers and stopping accordingly, demoed in a Mercedes-Benz.

- [NVIDIA CES 2026 News](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-alpha-mayo-self-driving)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron Speech ASR (Jan 8, 2026)

NVIDIA released Nemotron Speech ASR, a 600M parameter open source streaming speech recognition model with 24ms median latency and support for 900 concurrent streams on a single H100. Kwindla Hultman Kramer of Daily.co demoed sub-500ms voice-to-voice latency using a three-model pipeline of Nemotron ASR, Nemotron Nano LLM, and Magpie TTS.

**24ms** Nemotron Speech latency

- [NVIDIA Nemotron AI Dev on X](https://x.com/NVIDIAAIDev/status/2008654492204441862)
- [Nemotron Speech on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/nemotron-speech-streaming-en-0.6b)
- [Nemotron Speech ASR Blog](https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/nemotron-speech-asr-scaling-voice-agents)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-nemotron-speech-asr)

### Pruna AI — Qwen Edit 2512 (Jan 8, 2026)

PrunaAI released an optimized version of Qwen Edit 2512 that generates high-resolution realistic images in under 7 seconds. The optimized model is available to run on Replicate.

- [Qwen Edit 2512 on Replicate](https://replicate.com/p/qwen-edit-2512)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026)

### Upstage — Solar Open 100B (Jan 8, 2026)

Upstage released Solar Open 100B, a 102B parameter MoE model with only 12B active parameters per token (129 experts, top-8 activation), trained on 19.7 trillion tokens including 4.5T synthetic via a 'data factory' approach. It outperforms GLM 4.5 Air on many benchmarks, features the SNAP PO reinforcement learning technique with a 50% training speedup, and delivers best-in-class Korean language performance.

**102B** Solar Open params

- [Solar Open 100B on X](https://x.com/kchonyc/status/2008191520881639504)
- [Solar Open 100B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/upstage/Solar-Open-100B)
- [Solar Open Tech Report](https://t.co/TN8uPdHkNt)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-solar-open)

## Products & Apps

### Anthropic — Claude Cowork (Jan 15, 2026)

Anthropic launched Claude Cowork, a research preview that brings Claude Code-style agentic workflows to non-technical users. It was built in a week-and-a-half sprint with 100% of the code written by Claude Code itself; it is Mac-only, requires a Max subscription, and includes a Chrome connector for browser automation. Alex demoed it live, adding Flux Klein support to an image extension project without looking at a single line of code.

**100%** Claude-coded Cowork

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-claude-cowork)

### Anthropic — Claude for Healthcare (Jan 15, 2026)

Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, a HIPAA-ready offering as the major labs push into medical AI. The panel noted Claude's Opus 4.5 scoring 92% on Med Agent Bench as part of Anthropic's healthcare positioning.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-open-source-ai-models)

### Doctronic — AI Prescription Renewals (Jan 8, 2026)

Doctronic launched the first US pilot in Utah where AI can autonomously renew prescriptions without a physician in the loop. The service costs $4 per renewal and covers 190 routine medications, excluding controlled substances.

- [Doctronic - AI Prescription Renewals](https://doctronic.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-gpt-health-ai-medicine)

### NVIDIA — Vera Rubin (Jan 8, 2026)

Jensen Huang unveiled the Vera Rubin platform at CES 2026, NVIDIA's next-gen AI computer delivering 50 PFLOPS and 5x inference performance over Blackwell while adding only ~200W of power draw. It needs 75% fewer GPUs for 10 trillion parameter MoE training, packs 72 GPUs per rack with 20.7TB memory and 13 TB/s bandwidth, is 100% liquid cooled, and entered full production just four months after the B300.

**5x** Vera Rubin vs Blackwell · **75%** Fewer GPUs needed

- [NVIDIA CES 2026 News](https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-nvidia-ces-vera-rubin)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Health (Jan 8, 2026)

OpenAI launched a waitlist for ChatGPT Health, a privacy-first vertical for health conversations with connected health records and fitness apps including Apple Health, Function Health, MyFitnessPal, and Peloton. The panel noted LLMs are well-suited to medicine since there are only ~2,000 diseases and ~2,000 prescription drugs to master.

- [ChatGPT Health Waitlist](https://chatgpt.com/health/waitlist)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-gpt-health-ai-medicine)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — MCP Apps (Jan 29, 2026)

Anthropic's MCP Apps render interactive, branded UI components (Box files, Figma, color pickers) directly within Claude conversations, evolving MCP from tools to embedded app experiences. It is protocol-based, so any app can integrate, letting brands reclaim identity from text-only LLM responses.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2015851783655194640)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-anthropic-mcp-apps)

### Google — Chrome Auto-Browse (Jan 29, 2026)

Google unveiled Chrome Auto-Browse with Gemini 3 Nano integration, bringing agentic browsing to Pro and Ultra subscribers in the world's most-used browser with 4 billion daily users. Native browsing avoids Cloudflare bot detection, and Gemini's 2M context window suits long browsing sessions.

**4B** Chrome daily users

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/addyosmani/status/2016576478209855895)
- [Google Blog](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/gemini-3-auto-browse/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-chrome-auto-browse)

### Google — Gemini 3 Flash Agentic Vision (Jan 29, 2026)

Gemini 3 Flash gains agentic vision: a Think-Act-Observe loop that can zoom, crop, annotate, and plot images by generating and executing Python code in the backend. Available in the Gemini app, AI Studio, and Vertex AI.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/osanseviero/status/2016236082501959783)
- [Docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/code-execution)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-agentic-vision-gemini3-flash)

### Browser Use — Browser Use Skill (Jan 22, 2026)

Browser Use was released as an agent skill, installable via registries like Vercel's skills.sh. Wolfram flagged it as a signal of the broader shift away from MCP servers toward skills, since skills are easier to use with the CLI or API directly.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-tools-skills-sh)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Ads (Jan 22, 2026)

OpenAI announced it is testing ads in the ChatGPT Free and Go tiers, framing the rollout around user trust and transparency. The company also announced age detection models for the upcoming adult mode, putting the memory and personalization data of 900M weekly active users in a new light.

- [OpenAI testing ads in ChatGPT (X)](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2012223373489614951)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-openai-ads-constitution)

### Chorus — Chorus Skills Support (Jan 15, 2026)

Alex used a Ralph loop with Claude Code to add full agent skills support to Chorus, the open-source app that compares answers across multiple LLMs, in about 3.5 hours. The work added a settings panel, filesystem skill discovery, front-matter parsing, and cross-model skill injection, letting the same Claude-style skills run on GPT 5.2 Codex, Gemini, and any OpenRouter model.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-demo-adding-skills-to-chorus)

### Google — Gemini Personal Intelligence (Jan 15, 2026)

Google shipped personalized AI in Gemini, letting it reason across a user's Gmail, YouTube, Photos, and Search history with explicit opt-in for US Pro and Ultra subscribers. Alex tested it live: it inferred he drives a Tesla Model Y from emails and noticed his recent Honda Odyssey searches, highlighting Google's data moat over OpenAI and Anthropic.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-gemini-personal-intelligence)

### Amazon — Alexa+ on the Web (Jan 8, 2026)

Amazon made Alexa Plus, its upgraded smart assistant, available as a web chat interface for $20/month. It supports free-flowing conversations without repeating the wake word, integrates with smart home devices via natural language, and can continue conversations across devices; voice on the web is coming later.

- [Alexa Plus on the Web](https://alexa.amazon.com/about)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-alexa-plus)

### Google — Gmail Gemini Era (Jan 8, 2026)

Breaking during the show: Google integrated Gemini 3 into Gmail for 3 billion users, adding AI Overviews, smart replies, and natural language inbox search. It marks one of the largest consumer AI rollouts to date, bringing Gmail into the 'Gemini era.'

- [Google Gmail Gemini Era on X](https://x.com/Google/status/2009265269382742346)
- [Gmail Gemini Era Blog](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/gmail/gmail-is-entering-the-gemini-era/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-tldr)

## APIs & Platforms

### xAI — Grok Imagine API (Jan 29, 2026)

xAI released the Grok Imagine API, exposing its image and video generation capabilities to developers through the xAI console. The show subtitle notes Grok Imagine ranking #1 among generation models this week.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/xai/status/2016745652739363129)
- [xAI Console](https://console.x.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-grok-imagine-api)

## Dev Tools

### Moonshot AI — Kimi Code (Jan 29, 2026)

Alongside Kimi K2.5, Moonshot AI shipped Kimi Code, a coding tool that pairs with its new flagship model's strong agentic coding abilities. The code is available on GitHub with an announcement page at kimi.ai/code.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/2016034259350520226)
- [Kimi Code](https://kimi.ai/code)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/MoonshotAI/kimi-code)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026)

### Anthropic — Claude Code VS Code Extension (Jan 22, 2026)

Anthropic's Claude Code VS Code extension reached general availability, bringing full agentic coding directly into the IDE. The GA release makes Claude Code's agent workflows accessible from the VS Code Marketplace without the CLI.

- [Claude Code VS Code Extension (X)](https://x.com/claudeai/status/2013704053226717347)
- [Claude Code VS Code on Marketplace](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=anthropic.claude-code)
- [Claude Code VS Code docs](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-tools-skills-sh)

### Peter Steinberger — Clawdbot (Jan 22, 2026)

Clawdbot, created by Peter Steinberger, is an open-source personal AI assistant that runs locally on your Mac and connects via WhatsApp, Telegram, or Discord. Its killer feature is self-improvement: ask it to learn something and it writes its own skill files, giving a single chat conversation control over multiple agents, persistent memory, voice messages, image generation, and browser automation on your actual computer.

- [Clawdbot by Peter Steinberger (X post)](https://x.com/steipete/status/2013666639330369894)
- [Clawdbot review on MacStories](https://macstories.net/stories/clawdbot-showed-me-what-the-future-of-personal-ai-assistants-looks-like/)
- [clawd.bot — Official site](http://clawd.bot)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-clawdbot-deep-dive)

### Vercel — skills.sh (Jan 22, 2026)

Vercel launched skills.sh, a registry where you can browse and install agent skills from the command line for any agent, including Clawdbot. It hit 20K installs within hours, and releases like Browser Use shipping as a skill signal a broader shift from MCP servers toward skills.

- [skills.sh](https://skills.sh)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-tools-skills-sh)

### Vercel — Next.js/React Skill Packs (Jan 15, 2026)

Vercel began releasing official agent skill packs for Next.js and React, packaging its framework expertise in the agent skills standard. Ryan Carson highlighted that you can point any skills-compatible coding agent at the pack and it installs the skills for you, an early sign of experts shipping domain knowledge as skills.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-scripts-references-assets)

### Weights & Biases — Catnip (Jan 8, 2026)

Chris Van Pelt of Weights & Biases released Catnip, an open source iOS app that lets you run Claude Code from anywhere via GitHub Codespaces. It is available on the App Store with source on GitHub.

- [Catnip by W&B on App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/w-b-catnip/id6755161660)
- [Catnip on GitHub](https://github.com/wandb/catnip)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026)

## Papers & Research

### Sakana AI — RePo (Jan 22, 2026)

Sakana AI introduced RePo, a research technique that lets language models dynamically reorganize their context for better attention. The paper proposes a new way to manage what a model focuses on, aimed at improving performance on long-context tasks.

- [Sakana AI RePo announcement (X)](https://x.com/SakanaAILabs/status/2013046887746843001)
- [RePo paper (arXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14391)
- [RePo project page](https://pub.sakana.ai/repo/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026)

### KAIST — Avatar Forcing (Jan 8, 2026)

KAIST published Avatar Forcing, a framework for real-time interactive talking-head avatars with approximately 500ms latency. The paper targets responsive, live avatar interaction rather than offline video generation.

- [Avatar Forcing Paper (KAIST)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00664)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026)

## Funding

### xAI — xAI Series E (Jan 8, 2026)

xAI raised a $20B Series E at a $230B valuation with NVIDIA and Cisco as strategic investors, even as Grok faced major backlash over its image model's lack of NSFW guardrails ('bikini-gate'). The company claimed 600M active users by counting all X users.

**$20B** XAI Series E

- [XAI Grok Bikini Controversy (CNN)](https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/08/tech/elon-musk-xai-digital-undressing)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-grok-xai)

### Zhipu AI (GLM) — Zhipu AI IPO (Jan 8, 2026)

Zhipu AI, the makers of the GLM model family, became the world's first major LLM company to go public, listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and raising $558M. The IPO marks a milestone for Chinese AI labs monetizing frontier model development.

- [Zhipu AI (GLM makers)](https://www.zhipuai.cn/en/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-zhipu-ipo-nuscoder)

## Acquisitions

### OpenAI — Klein team acqui-hire (Codex) (Jan 29, 2026)

The Klein team was acqui-hired by OpenAI's Codex group following the viral 'imagine the smell' hackathon controversy. Discussed as part of the growing Codex ecosystem, which Peter Steinberger used to build Clawdbot entirely.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 29 - Genie3 is here, Clawd rebrands, Kimi K2.5 surprises, Chrome goes agentic & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-29-2026#sec-tools-karpathy-agent-coding)

### OpenAI — Torch Health (Jan 15, 2026)

OpenAI acquired Torch Health as part of its push into healthcare with GPT Health. The move came the same week Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare, with both labs racing toward HIPAA-ready medical AI products.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-medgemma)

### NVIDIA — Groq acquisition (Jan 8, 2026)

NVIDIA entered an exclusive licensing deal with Groq and acquired most of its team for approximately $20B. Groq's inference-optimized chips, created by former Google TPU lead Jonathan Ross, complement NVIDIA's training dominance as inference demand grows exponentially across AI use cases.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-nvidia-groq-acquisition)

## Also Released

### Anthropic — Claude Constitution (Jan 22, 2026)

Anthropic published a roughly 90-page Constitution for Claude, a values document baked into the model at training and reinforcement learning time rather than a runtime system prompt. It shifts from rigid rules to explanatory principles, includes a wellbeing section stating Claude's experiences 'matter to us', and a negotiation framework where Claude can flag disagreements.

**90 pages** Claude Constitution length

- [Anthropic Claude Constitution announcement (X)](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2014005798691877083)
- [Claude's Constitution — full document](https://www.anthropic.com/constitution)
- [Anthropic blog announcement](https://anthropic.com/news/claudes-constitution)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 22 - Clawdbot deep dive, GLM 4.7 Flash, Anthropic constitution + 3 new TSS models](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-22-2026#sec-claude-constitution)

### OpenAI — OpenAI x Cerebras Partnership (Jan 15, 2026)

OpenAI announced a $10 billion partnership with Cerebras for 750 megawatts of high-speed inference compute, with capacity starting in 2028. It extends OpenAI's pattern of locking in massive compute supply deals beyond its existing cloud partners.

**$10B** OpenAI × Cerebras

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 15 - Agent Skills Deep Dive, GPT 5.2 Codex Builds a Browser, Claude Cowork for the Masses, and the Era of Personalized AI!](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-15-2026#sec-drama-corner-partnerships)

### Ryan Carson — Ralph Wiggum (Jan 8, 2026)

Ryan Carson published a viral breakdown (1.2M views on X) of Ralph Wiggum, the autonomous coding technique created by Jeff Huntley: write a PRD, break it into atomic user stories with acceptance criteria in JSON, then run a bash loop that has a CLI agent pick the next story, code it, commit, and loop. The technique works with any CLI agent (Amp, Claude Code, Cursor CLI, Gemini CLI), compounds learning via agents.md, and won a YC hackathon running overnight on Sonnet 4.5.

**1.2M** Ralph article views

- [Ryan Carson's Ralph Wiggum Article](https://x.com/ryancarson/status/2008548371712135632)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Jan 8 - Vera Rubin's 5x Jump, Ralph Wiggum Goes Viral, GPT Health Launches & XAI Raises $20B Mid-Controversy](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-08-2026#sec-ralph-wiggum)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in January 2026 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-01), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2026-01 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in December 2025

> 58 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-12


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 3 Coder (Dec 25, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen 3 Coder landed in July with what the crew called insane benchmark scores for an open-weights coding model. Together with Kimi K2 and GLM 4.5 it made July the peak month for Chinese open source.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-july)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen speech-to-speech model (Dec 25, 2025)

Qwen released a speech-to-speech model in March with internal emotion handling, joining the wave of voice-native models. It was part of the Qwen team's relentless 2025 release cadence across modalities.

- [Mar 27 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-mar-27-gemini-25-takes-1)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-march)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4 (Dec 25, 2025)

Claude Opus 4 launched in Q2 and became Ryan Carson's pick as the best coding model he had used in over 700 days of daily LLM coding. It cemented Anthropic's lead in agentic coding through the middle of the year.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

### Black Forest Labs — Flux 3 (Dec 25, 2025)

Flux 3 dropped in August and immediately became the gold standard for image generation, landing three years almost to the day after Stable Diffusion first went public. Wolfram used it as the yardstick for how far image AI traveled in those three years.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-august)

### Daily (Pipecat) — Smart Turn Detection (Dec 25, 2025)

Kwindla's Daily.co shipped smart turn detection during Q2, an open model that helps voice agents know when a speaker has actually finished talking. It landed in the quarter when voice agents first got attention outside the builder bubble.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek R1 (Dec 25, 2025)

DeepSeek's open-weights reasoning model dropped January 23rd and matched OpenAI's o1 at roughly 50x cheaper pricing, with an alleged training cost of just $5.5M. It crashed NVIDIA stock 17% — a $560B single-day loss, the largest single-company monetary loss in history — and made Chinese AI a household topic. The crew named it the earthquake that shattered assumptions about who leads AI.

**$560B** NVIDIA stock loss · **$5.5M** DeepSeek R1 training cost

- [Jan 24 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-23-2025-deepseek-r1)
- [Jan 30 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-30-deepseek-vs-nasdaq)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus (Dec 25, 2025)

DeepSeek resurfaced in September with V3.1 Terminus, another strong open-weights release that arrived just as the crew was barely keeping up with the weekly firehose. Nisten noted that missing a single week in this period left you completely lost.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-september)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.5 (Dec 25, 2025)

Gemini 2.5 briefly claimed the top benchmark position in March, the moment Wolfram identified as the pivotal point where OpenAI stopped being the undisputed leader. It foreshadowed Google's full comeback later in the year.

- [Mar 27 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-mar-27-gemini-25-takes-1)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-march)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini TTS (Dec 25, 2025)

As part of Google's December release wave, a Gemini TTS model shipped alongside realtime model updates. It rounded out Google's full-stack voice story heading into 2026.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-december)

### Google DeepMind — VEO3 (Dec 25, 2025)

Google's VEO3 stunned everyone in Q2 with video generation that included native audio, which the crew credits with crossing the uncanny valley for AI video. It was a centerpiece of Google IO 2025 and of Google's comeback year.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

### Hexgrad (Kokoro) — Kokoro TTS (Dec 25, 2025)

Kokoro, a tiny 82M parameter text-to-speech model, went viral in January after hitting #1 on TTS Arena. Released under Apache 2.0 and small enough to run in the browser, it showed that high-quality speech synthesis no longer required huge models.

- [Jan 10 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-9th-nvidias-tiny-supercomputer)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### MiniMax (Hailuo) — Hailuo 2.3 (Dec 25, 2025)

MiniMax released Hailuo 2.3 (referred to as 'Hailuo LLM 2.3' on the show) in November, cited as another strong release from the Chinese labs. It closed out a year in which MiniMax shipped everything from 4M-context LLMs to media models.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-november)

### MiniMax (Hailuo) — MiniMax-01 (Dec 25, 2025)

MiniMax (Hailuo) released MiniMax-01 in January with a 4 million token context window, by far the largest context of any open-weights model at the time. It was an early sign of the Chinese-lab open source dominance that defined 2025.

- [Jan 17 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-16-2025-hailuo-4m-context)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### Moonshot AI (Kimi) — Kimi K2 (Dec 25, 2025)

Moonshot AI's Kimi K2 dropped in July and earned serious mainstream recognition, marking peak Chinese-lab dominance of open source. It was named in the show's TL;DR as one of the defining open-weights releases of 2025.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-july)

### OpenAI — GPT-5 Codex (Dec 25, 2025)

GPT-5 Codex dropped in September as OpenAI's coding-specialized fine-tune of GPT-5. Yam dubbed it the 'infinite money glitch' because the release moved OpenAI-linked stock prices significantly.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-september)

### OpenAI — Sora 2 (Dec 25, 2025)

Sora 2 opened Q4 in October by democratizing video generation, complete with a social platform, and spawned a wave of memes still circulating at year's end. The show's TL;DR credits it as part of 2025 crossing the uncanny valley for AI media.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-october)

### OpenAI — New voice models (GPT Realtime derivatives) (Dec 25, 2025)

In March, OpenAI released two voice models derived from its GPT Realtime speech-to-speech stack. They were part of a wave that pushed voice agents toward the mainstream over the course of 2025.

- [Mar 20 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-mar-20-openais-new-voices)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-march)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — Hunyuan open weights (Dec 25, 2025)

In July, Tencent's Hunyuan team (rendered as 'HO One' in the episode) joined Huawei in entering the open-weights model race. It widened the field of Chinese labs shipping serious open models beyond DeepSeek, Qwen, and Moonshot.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-july)

### Zhipu AI (GLM) — GLM 4.5 (Dec 25, 2025)

Zhipu's GLM 4.5 came out in July and was the first open model that ran on Cerebras hardware fast enough that hackathon competitors were winning with it. It set up GLM's quiet rise as a business workhorse later in the year.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-july)

### Zhipu AI (GLM) — GLM 4.6 (Dec 25, 2025)

Zhipu's GLM 4.6 arrived in October and, per Nisten, quietly became a go-to model that many businesses still run today. It continued GLM's trajectory from hackathon favorite to production workhorse.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-october)

### Allen AI — BOLMO (Dec 18, 2025)

Allen AI released BOLMO, described as the first byte-level language model to reach parity with regular tokenization-based models. The panel framed it as a research breakthrough that could eventually remove tokenizers from the LLM stack.

- [BOLMO announcement](https://x.com/allen_ai/status/2000616646042399047)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Allen AI — OLMO 2 (multimodal) (Dec 18, 2025)

Allen AI extended its OLMO family with multimodal models that accept video input, released in 4B, 7B, and 8B sizes. It continues Allen AI's fully open approach to model development alongside the BOLMO byte-level work.

- [OLMO multimodal announcement](https://x.com/allen_ai/status/2000962068774588536)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Google DeepMind — FunctionGemma (Dec 18, 2025)

Google released FunctionGemma, a tiny 270M-parameter open model specialized for function calling on-device. With a roughly 500MB RAM footprint and strong gains after fine-tuning for mobile actions, it points toward privacy-first local agents on constrained hardware.

- [FunctionGemma docs](https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/functiongemma)
- [FunctionGemma blog](https://blog.google/technology/developers/functiongemma/)
- [FunctionGemma announcement on X](https://x.com/osanseviero/status/2001704034667769978)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-functiongemma-edge-agents)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3 Flash (Dec 18, 2025)

Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, offering frontier-tier capability at flash-tier pricing of $0.50 per million input tokens. It scores 78% on SWE-bench Verified, beating larger models on some agentic tasks, and supports tool-calling at scale with up to 100 simultaneous function calls.

**$0.50** per 1M Gemini 3 Flash input tokens · **78%** SWE-bench Verified

- [Gemini 3 Flash announcement](https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/flash/)
- [Logan Kilpatrick announcement on X](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2001322275656835348)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Meta AI — SAM Audio (Dec 18, 2025)

Meta released SAM Audio, an audio source separation model that extends the Segment Anything concept to sound. It supports multimodal prompting via text, visual, and temporal cues to isolate sources from audio, with weights on Hugging Face and code on GitHub.

- [Meta SAM Audio (GitHub)](https://github.com/facebookresearch/sam-audio)
- [SAM Audio (HF)](https://huggingface.co/facebook/sam-audio-large)
- [SAM Audio announcement](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/2000980784425931067)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-voice-audio)

### Mistral AI — Mistral OCR 3 (Dec 18, 2025)

Mistral released OCR 3, its latest document intelligence model, claiming a 74% win-rate over OCR v2. The panel highlighted its aggressive pricing and document performance gains as part of the open-source-adjacent European push on practical document AI.

- [Mistral OCR 3 blog](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr-3)
- [Mistral OCR 3 announcement](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/2001669581275033741)
- [Mistral Console](https://console.mistral.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### NVIDIA — Nemotron 3 Nano (Dec 18, 2025)

NVIDIA released Nemotron 3 Nano, a 30B-parameter hybrid Mamba-MoE model with only 3B active parameters for efficient inference. The panel called it the most consequential open release of the week because NVIDIA shipped not just weights but technical reports, training recipes, and details on the 25T-token training data.

**30B (3B active)** Nemotron 3 Nano parameters

- [NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano announcement](https://x.com/ctnzr/status/2000567572065091791)
- [NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano (HF BF16)](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16)
- [NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano (HF FP8)](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### OpenAI — GPT 5.2 Codex (Dec 18, 2025)

OpenAI released GPT 5.2 Codex via API after months of exclusivity in the Codex app, making it available in Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and VS Code with native context compaction for long sessions. Cursor showcased it by building a complete browser from scratch in Rust, roughly 3 million lines of code across about 330,000 commits, driven by hundreds of concurrent agents.

**56.4%** SWE-Bench Pro · **64%** Terminal-Bench 2.0

- [OpenAI GPT 5.2 Codex](https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-2-codex/)
- [GPT 5.2 Codex announcement on X](https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2001720483872674269)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### OpenAI — GPT Image 1.5 (Dec 18, 2025)

OpenAI released GPT Image 1.5, an upgraded image generation model that is 4x faster and 20% cheaper than its predecessor. It debuted at #1 on the LMSYS Image Arena leaderboard, part of OpenAI's rapid-fire release week.

- [OpenAI GPT Image 1.5 announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2000990989629161873)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Resemble AI — Chatterbox Turbo (Dec 18, 2025)

Resemble AI released Chatterbox Turbo, an MIT-licensed 350M-parameter open text-to-speech model. The company claims it beats ElevenLabs in blind listening tests, pushing high-quality TTS into fully open, accessible territory.

- [Resemble Chatterbox Turbo (GitHub)](https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox)
- [Chatterbox Turbo (HF)](https://huggingface.co/ResembleAI/chatterbox-turbo)
- [Chatterbox Turbo blog](https://www.resemble.ai/chatterbox-turbo/)
- [Chatterbox Turbo on X](https://x.com/0xDevShah/status/2000631462786400718)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-voice-audio)

### Amazon — Amazon Nova 2 (Dec 4, 2025)

Amazon rolled out the Nova 2 model suite spanning text, speech, and multimodal stacks with Lite, Pro, Sonic, and Omni variants. The launch came with major benchmark jumps over the first Nova generation and includes a fast, cost-effective reasoning model in Nova 2 Lite.

- [Amazon Nova 2 launch (AWS blog)](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-nova-2-lite-a-fast-cost-effective-reasoning-model/)
- [Amazon News announcement on X](https://x.com/amazonnews/status/1995898375649050753)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Arcee AI — Arcee Trinity (Dec 4, 2025)

Arcee AI introduced Trinity, a family of US-trained open mixture-of-experts models built from scratch, starting with Trinity-Mini and Trinity-Nano-Preview. CTO Lukas Atkins joined the show to discuss the training approach and previewed Trinity-Large for January 2026. The release positions Arcee as a domestic alternative in an open-weights field dominated by Chinese labs.

- [Arcee Trinity Manifesto](https://www.arcee.ai/blog/the-trinity-manifesto)
- [Trinity-Mini (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Trinity-Mini)
- [Trinity-Nano-Preview (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/arcee-ai/Trinity-Nano-Preview)
- [Lukas Atkins announcement on X](https://x.com/latkins/status/1995592664637665702)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### ByteDance — SeeDream 4.5 (Dec 4, 2025)

ByteDance's SeeDream 4.5 image model shipped with emphasis on multi-reference fusion and improved text rendering, an area the panel noted remains a key differentiator among image generators.

- [BytePlus announcement on X](https://x.com/BytePlusGlobal/status/1996212339096576463)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V3.2 / V3.2-Speciale (Dec 4, 2025)

DeepSeek released V3.2 and the reasoning-first V3.2-Speciale, a 685B-parameter MoE under MIT license. Speciale posted gold-medal-level olympiad results and 96% on AIME (versus GPT-5 High at 94%), with V3.2 hitting 73.1% on SWE-Bench Verified. Aggressive pricing around 28 cents per 1M tokens on OpenRouter pushes open models closer to top closed-model capability.

**96%** AIME · **73.1%** SWE-Bench Verified · **685B** Total parameters (MoE) · **28¢** Per 1M tokens on OpenRouter

- [DeepSeek V3.2 (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2)
- [DeepSeek V3.2-Speciale (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale)
- [DeepSeek V3.2 announcement](https://platform.deepseek.com/blog/deepseek-v3-2)
- [DeepSeek announcement on X](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1995452641430651132)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Kling AI — Kling O1 Image (Dec 4, 2025)

Alongside its video update, Kling shipped O1 Image, expanding the company's generation stack into still images. The release rounds out Kling's multimodal offering beyond its core video models.

- [Kling O1 Image announcement on X](https://x.com/Kling_ai/status/1995741899517542818)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-vision-video)

### Kling AI — Kling VIDEO 2.6 (Dec 4, 2025)

Kling released VIDEO 2.6, its first video model with native audio generation, producing sound directly alongside generated footage. It was one of two Kling releases this week spanning video and image generation.

- [Kling VIDEO 2.6 announcement on X](https://x.com/Kling_ai/status/1996238606814593196)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-vision-video)

### Microsoft — VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B (Dec 4, 2025)

Microsoft published VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B on Hugging Face, a small realtime text-to-speech model claiming roughly 300ms latency. The show framed it as more evidence that sub-second audio response is becoming table stakes for production voice agents.

**~300ms** Claimed TTS latency · **0.5B** Parameters

- [Microsoft VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B)
- [Community post on X](https://x.com/Presidentlin/status/1996461134388625628)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-voice-audio)

### Mistral AI — Mistral 3 (Large 3 + Ministral 3) (Dec 4, 2025)

Mistral relaunched its model family under permissive Apache 2.0 licensing with Mistral Large 3 and the small Ministral 3 edge models. Large 3 ships a 256K context window and strong open-model coding positioning. The licensing shift reignited discussion around open model portability and deployability.

**256K** Mistral Large 3 context window

- [Mistral 3 blog](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-3/)
- [Mistral Large 3 (Hugging Face collection)](https://huggingface.co/collections/mistralai/mistral-large-3)
- [Ministral 3 (Hugging Face collection)](https://huggingface.co/collections/mistralai/ministral-3)
- [Mistral announcement on X](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1995872766177018340)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Nous Research — Hermes 4.3 (Dec 4, 2025)

Nous Research released Hermes 4.3-36B, highlighted on the show for being trained with decentralized infrastructure and for state-of-the-art RefusalBench performance. The release continues the Hermes line of open, steerable instruction-tuned models.

- [Hermes 4.3-36B (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-4.3-36B)
- [Nous Research on X](https://x.com/nousresearch)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Pruna AI — P-Image (Dec 4, 2025)

Pruna AI promoted P-Image, an image generation offering with sub-second generation times at roughly $0.005 per image. The release fit the week's diffusion theme of competing on speed and cost efficiency rather than just quality.

**$0.005** Per image

- [Pruna P-Image](https://pruna.ai/p-image)
- [Pruna demo](https://demo.pruna.ai)
- [Pruna announcement on X](https://x.com/PrunaAI/status/1995524846948700495)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion)

### Runway — Runway Gen-4.5 (Dec 4, 2025)

Runway's Gen-4.5 video model climbed to the top of the text-to-video leaderboard with a 1,247 Elo rating. The result continued the weekly theme of video generation quality and multimodal consistency improving fast.

**1,247** Text-to-video leaderboard Elo

- [Runway Gen-4.5 update](https://x.com/runwayml/status/1995493445243461846)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-vision-video)

## Products & Apps

### Cursor — Cursor 2 + Composer (Dec 25, 2025)

Cursor shipped Cursor 2 along with its Composer model in October, leveling up in-IDE agentic coding. It capped a year in which Cursor's sales exploded on the back of Claude 3.7 and the vibe coding wave.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-october)

### NVIDIA — Project Digits (Dec 25, 2025)

NVIDIA announced Project Digits in January, a $3,000 desktop supercomputer capable of running 200B parameter models locally. It brought serious local-inference hardware to individual developers and was one of January's standout hardware stories.

- [Jan 10 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-9th-nvidias-tiny-supercomputer)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### OpenAI — Deep Research (Dec 25, 2025)

OpenAI's Deep Research launched in February as an agentic research tool that scored 26.6% on Humanity's Last Exam, versus roughly 10% for o1 and R1. The crew called it a jaw-dropping leap in AI research capability and one of February's defining releases.

**26.6%** HLE (Humanity's Last Exam)

- [Feb 07 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-feb-6-openai-deepresearch)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-february)

### OpenAI — Operator (Dec 25, 2025)

OpenAI launched Operator in January as the first agentic version of ChatGPT that could control a browser to complete tasks on the user's behalf. It kicked off the year-of-agents narrative, though it launched within 24 hours of DeepSeek R1 and was completely overshadowed by it.

- [Jan 24 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-23-2025-deepseek-r1)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### Reve — Reve image platform (Dec 25, 2025)

Reve (rendered as 'RevA' in the episode) emerged in September as a four-in-one image creation and editing platform. Alex said he still uses it daily, making it one of the year's sleeper product hits.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q3-september)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT App Store (Dec 18, 2025)

OpenAI opened app submissions for the ChatGPT App Store, built on the MCP-powered apps model. Developers can now submit apps that run inside ChatGPT, signaling OpenAI's platform play for distribution of agentic apps.

- [ChatGPT Apps submission](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2001419749016899868)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Weights & Biases — LLM Evaluation Jobs (Dec 4, 2025)

Weights & Biases launched LLM Evaluation Jobs, letting teams run evaluations against any OpenAI-compatible API during training cycles instead of only at the end. The show framed it as a practical workflow upgrade for getting earlier model quality signals without blindly burning compute.

- [W&B LLM Evaluation Jobs](https://wandb.ai/site/articles/llm-evaluation-jobs)
- [W&B announcement on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/1995921086257791070)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Claude Skills (Dec 25, 2025)

Anthropic launched Claude Skills in October. It was largely missed at release but picked up steam fast, with the show arguing Skills is 'MCP level if not bigger' for Claude users as a way to package reusable agent capabilities.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-october)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Memory (Dec 25, 2025)

In Q2, OpenAI shipped memory for ChatGPT, letting the assistant carry context across all of a user's past conversations. It was one of the quarter's notable product-layer upgrades alongside native image generation.

- [Apr 10 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-100th-episode-meta-llama)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

### OpenAI — GPT-4o native image generation (Dec 25, 2025)

OpenAI shipped native image generation in GPT-4o, producing the viral Ghibli-style image wave and bringing AI image creation to the ChatGPT mainstream. Wolfram cited the 2025 paradigm shift in image generation as his release of the year.

- [Apr 24 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-apr-23rd-gpt-image-and-grok)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

### Windsurf — Code Maps (Dec 25, 2025)

Windsurf released Code Maps in November, a feature that generates flowchart-style maps of entire codebases. It was one of the quieter but practical dev-tool releases in a month dominated by frontier model drops.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q4-november)

### Cursor — GPT-5.1-Codex-Max in Cursor (Dec 4, 2025)

Cursor made OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max available free to users through December 11, alongside a blog post on its codex model harness. The promotion gives developers no-cost access to a frontier coding model inside the editor.

- [Cursor codex model harness blog](https://cursor.com/blog/codex-model-harness)
- [Cursor announcement on X](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1996645841063604711)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3 Deep Think (Dec 4, 2025)

Google shipped Deep Think, a high-cost parallel reasoning mode for Gemini 3 that scored 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2. The panel framed it as Google pressing its advantage in the frontier race, where product integration and latency now matter as much as raw benchmark IQ.

**45.1%** ARC-AGI-2

- [Gemini 3 Deep Think blog](https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3-deep-think/)
- [Gemini App announcement on X](https://x.com/GeminiApp/status/1996656314983109003)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 4, 2025 - DeepSeek V3.2 Goes Gold Medal, Mistral Returns to Apache 2.0, OpenAI Hits Code Red, and US-Trained MOEs Are Back!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-04-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

## APIs & Platforms

### xAI — Grok Voice Agent API (Dec 18, 2025)

xAI launched the Grok Voice Agent API with flat-rate pricing of $0.05 per minute and integration into Tesla vehicles. xAI claims the #1 spot on Big Bench Audio at 92.3%, tightening competition in the rapidly commoditizing real-time voice stack.

**$0.05/min** Grok Voice Agent API

- [xAI Grok Voice Agent API](https://x.com/xai/status/2001385958147752255)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-18-2025#sec-voice-audio)

## Dev Tools

### Anthropic — Claude Code (Dec 25, 2025)

Claude Code launched in February, having started as an internal Anthropic engineering tool. Multiple co-hosts picked it as the single most impactful AI release of 2025 — it began the CLI agent era and proved, in Kwindla's words, that 'sometimes it's mostly about the harness.'

- [Feb 28 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/feb-27-2025-gpt-45-drops-today-claude)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-february)

## Funding

### OpenAI (with SoftBank & Oracle) — Project Stargate (Dec 25, 2025)

Announced in January, Project Stargate committed $500 billion to AI infrastructure in the US — described on the show as the Manhattan Project for AI. It set the tone for a year in which investment numbers stopped making sense.

**$500B** Project Stargate

- [Jan 24 Episode](https://sub.thursdai.news/p/thursdai-jan-23-2025-deepseek-r1)
- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q1-january)

### Thinking Machines Lab — Thinking Machines Lab (Dec 25, 2025)

Around June, news broke that Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab raised its first billion-dollar round, pulling in what LDJ described as 'an absolute avalanche of top tier researchers' from OpenAI and other labs. It was one of the year's biggest talent and funding stories.

- Podcast coverage: [🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!](https://thursdai.news/ep/dec-25-2025#sec-q2-april-may-june)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in December 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-12), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-12 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in November 2025

> 50 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-11


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Tongyi) — Z-Image Turbo (Nov 27, 2025)

Alibaba's Tongyi lab released Z-Image Turbo, a 6B-parameter open image generation model that produces images in under a second. It pushes open-source image generation toward real-time speeds at a fraction of the size of competing models.

**6B** Parameters

- [Z-Image Turbo on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo)
- [Z-Image on GitHub](https://github.com/Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Anthropic — Claude Opus 4.5 (Nov 27, 2025)

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, scoring 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified to top GPT-5.1 (77.9%) and Gemini 3 Pro (76.2%). It adds a new 'Effort' parameter for compute control, Tool Search to cut agent token overhead, and Programmatic Tool Calling where the model writes and executes code loops. Pricing dropped to $5/M input and $25/M output, roughly one-third the old Opus price.

**80.9%** SWE-bench Verified · **$5/M** Input token price · **$25/M** Output token price

- [Claude Opus 4.5 Announcement](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5)
- [Claude Opus 4.5 Tool Use Blog](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/advanced-tool-use)
- [Claude Opus 4.5 on X](https://x.com/claudeai/status/1993030546243699119)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-big-co-llms)

### Black Forest Labs — FLUX.2 (Nov 27, 2025)

Black Forest Labs released FLUX.2, a 32B-parameter image model with open weights (FLUX.2-dev) that supports multi-reference image editing. It lets users combine multiple reference images and prompt edits with variables, a step up in controllable image editing.

**32B** Parameters

- [FLUX.2 on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev)
- [FLUX.2 Blog](https://bfl.ai/blog/flux-2)
- [FLUX.2 Announcement on X](https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/1993345470945804563)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek Math V2 (Nov 27, 2025)

DeepSeek surfaced DeepSeek Math V2, a 685B-parameter Apache-2.0 model that reaches IMO gold-level math reasoning. It is the first open-weights math champion at this level, dropped quietly on HuggingFace during the week.

**685B** Parameters

- [DeepSeek Math V2 on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Microsoft — Fara-7B (Nov 27, 2025)

Microsoft Research released Fara-7B, a best-in-class 7B-parameter vision-language model for computer use that runs on-device. It scores 73.5% on WebVoyager, beating OpenAI's computer-use preview while being small enough to run locally.

**73.5%** WebVoyager

- [Fara-7B on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/Fara-7B)
- [Fara-7B Blog](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/fara-7b-best-in-class-7b-parameter-vision-language-model-for-computer-use/)
- [Fara-7B Announcement on X](https://x.com/MSFTResearch/status/1993024319186674114)
- [Fara on GitHub](https://github.com/microsoft/fara)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Prime Intellect — INTELLECT-3 (Nov 27, 2025)

Prime Intellect released INTELLECT-3, a 106B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 12B active parameters that scores 90% on AIME 2024/2025. The lab fully open-sourced the training stack alongside the weights, showing a small lab can train frontier-scale models.

**106B** Total parameters (12B active) · **90%** AIME 2024/2025

- [INTELLECT-3 on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/PrimeIntellect/INTELLECT-3)
- [INTELLECT-3 Blog](https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-3)
- [INTELLECT-3 Announcement on X](https://x.com/PrimeIntellect/status/1993895068290388134)
- [Try INTELLECT-3](https://chat.primeintellect.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — HunyuanOCR (Nov 27, 2025)

Tencent released HunyuanOCR, a 1B-parameter OCR model that scores 860 on OCRBench, beating models as large as Qwen3-VL-72B. It is a striking example of task-specialized small models outperforming generalist giants.

**1B** Parameters · **860** OCRBench score

- [HunyuanOCR on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/tencent/HunyuanOCR)
- [HunyuanOCR on GitHub](https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/HunyuanOCR)
- [HunyuanOCR Announcement on X](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1993202595264131436)
- [Hunyuan Vision Blog](https://hunyuan.tencent.com/vision/zh)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-vision-video)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — HunyuanVideo 1.5 (Nov 27, 2025)

Tencent released HunyuanVideo 1.5, a lightweight DiT-based open-source video generation model. It brings capable video generation to a smaller footprint, continuing the trend of open video models closing the gap with closed offerings.

- [HunyuanVideo on HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/tencent/HunyuanVideo)
- [HunyuanVideo on GitHub](https://github.com/Tencent/HunyuanVideo)
- [HunyuanVideo 1.5 Announcement on X](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1991721236855156984)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-vision-video)

### Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) — OLMo 3 (Nov 20, 2025)

Allen AI released OLMo 3, a fully open 32B dense model where the dataset, training recipe, and hyperparameters are all public — not just the weights. LDJ contrasted it with open-weights-only releases from Qwen and DeepSeek, which have never published a fully open recipe.

**32B** Dense parameters, fully open dataset and recipe

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-meta-sam-open-source)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 3 Pro (Nov 20, 2025)

Google's new frontier multimodal model with a 1M-token context window and huge reasoning gains, scoring 31.11% on ARC-AGI-2 (45.14% with Deep Think mode) — roughly double the previous SOTA — plus 81% on MMLU-Pro and major coding improvements. Amp switched to it as their default model on launch day, the first time they have ever switched defaults. Also rolling out across Gmail, Calendar, and AI Mode in Google Search.

**45.14%** ARC-AGI-2 (Deep Think) · **31.11%** ARC-AGI-2 (standard) · **1M** Token context window

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-gemini-3-pro)

### Google DeepMind — Nano Banana Pro (Nov 20, 2025)

Google's upgraded image model dropped as breaking news mid-show, adding visible thinking traces, 4K resolution output, and SynthID watermarking with C2PA metadata. Alex demoed it live by one-shotting an 8MB AI-news infographic with flawless text and pixel-accurate logos across the entire image. It also powers generative UIs in Gemini, building interactive dashboards with real data on the fly.

**4K** First image model with flawless 4K output and perfect text

- [AI Studio (Nano Banana Pro)](https://aistudio.google.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-nano-banana-pro)

### Meta AI — SAM 3 (Nov 20, 2025)

Meta's Segment Anything Model 3 adds open-vocabulary segmentation with text and exemplar prompts, letting you click or type to segment and track any object across images and video. The panel demoed it live on golden retriever videos, and it ships openly as part of Meta's open-source push.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-meta-sam-open-source)

### Meta AI — SAM 3D (Nov 20, 2025)

Released alongside SAM 3, SAM 3D reconstructs 3D objects and full human bodies from a single image with surprisingly high quality. It extends the Segment Anything family from 2D segmentation into single-image 3D reconstruction.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-meta-sam-open-source)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.1-Codex-Max (Nov 20, 2025)

OpenAI's newest frontier agentic coding model is trained with native compaction, letting it intelligently summarize prior context and work on a single task for 24+ hours (an internal run reportedly lasted a full week). It uses 30% fewer thinking tokens at median than its predecessors and sets a new SOTA of 58% on TerminalBench 2, also leading on SWE-Bench and SWE-Lancer. Windows PowerShell support is significantly improved, alongside an experimental Windows sandbox and a new extra-high reasoning level.

**58%** TerminalBench 2 (new SOTA) · **24h+** Single-task agent run time via native compaction · **30%** Fewer thinking tokens at median

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-openai-codex-max)

### Sunday Robotics — ACT-1 & Memo (Nov 20, 2025)

Sunday Robotics introduced ACT-1, a home robot foundation model, alongside its Memo robot. Instead of $20K teleoperation rigs, training data comes from a $200 skill glove, and the model handles long-horizon household tasks with solid zero-shot generalization.

**$200** Skill glove used for data collection vs $20K teleop rigs

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025)

### xAI — Grok 4.1 (Nov 20, 2025)

xAI's Grok 4.1 shipped in November alongside GPT-5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 in the year's most concentrated stretch of frontier releases. Yam highlighted the week-and-a-half window as emblematic of 2025's relentless acceleration.

**1483** LM Arena Elo (briefly #1)

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-grok-agent-tools)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen Image Edit Multi-Angle LoRA (Nov 13, 2025)

A Multi-Angle LoRA for Qwen Image Edit landed, enabling camera-control style edits that re-render a scene from new angles. Available as a Hugging Face space and on fal, it shows the fast-moving open ecosystem building on Qwen's image editing models.

- [Linoy Tsaban demo on X](https://x.com/linoy_tsaban/status/1986090375409533338)
- [Qwen-Image-Edit-Angles space on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/spaces/linoyts/Qwen-Image-Edit-Angles)
- [fal on X](https://x.com/fal/status/1988693046267969804?s=20)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025)

### Baidu — ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking (Nov 13, 2025)

Baidu released ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, an Apache 2.0 open-weights visual reasoning MoE with only 3B active parameters that claims to rival much larger models like GPT-5 High on vision tasks. It features image zooming, spatial grounding, and reasoning, with strong small-model performance attributed to GSPO training from the Qwen team.

**3B** Active Parameters

- [Baidu announcement on X](https://x.com/Baidu_Inc/status/1988182106359411178)
- [Hugging Face model page](https://huggingface.co/ERNIE/ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking)
- [GitHub repo](https://github.com/ERNIE/ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking)
- [Ernie blog post](https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/ernie-4-5-vl-28b-a3b-thinking)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-baidus-ernie-45-vl-and-visual-reasoning)

### ElevenLabs — Scribe v2 Realtime (Nov 13, 2025)

ElevenLabs launched Scribe v2 Realtime, a streaming speech-to-text model with roughly 150ms latency and support for over 90 languages, demoed live by Paul Asjes. It auto-switches languages mid-stream and handles code, initialisms, and technical terms with context-aware transcription, outpacing Whisper on speed and accuracy.

**150ms** Latency · **90+** Languages (Scribe)

- [ElevenLabs announcement on X](https://x.com/elevenlabsio/status/1988282248445976987)
- [ElevenLabs Agents](https://elevenlabs.io/agents)
- [ElevenLabs docs](https://docs.elevenlabs.io)
- [ElevenLabs Scribe V2 Real Time](https://elevenlabs.io)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-11labs-scribe-v2-real-time-launch)

### H Company — Holo2 (Nov 13, 2025)

Dropped live during the show: H Company open-sourced Holo2, a next-generation multimodal agent family fine-tuned on Qwen3-VL for grounding, navigation, and reasoning across web, desktop, and mobile. It posts SOTA results on computer-use and web-navigation benchmarks like OSWorld-G and ships in 4B, 8B, and 30B variants under Apache 2.0.

- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-breaking-news-age-company-releases-hello-two)

### Meta AI — Omnilingual ASR (Nov 13, 2025)

Meta released Omnilingual ASR, an Apache 2.0 speech recognition family supporting over 1,600 languages, including 500+ never before served by any ASR system, with character error rate under 10% for 78 languages. The release includes an open corpus of 500k+ rows of transcribed audio, and the 1B model was praised as a near drop-in state-of-the-art replacement on Hugging Face.

**1600+** Languages Supported

- [AI at Meta announcement on X](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1987946571439444361)
- [Meta blog post](https://ai.meta.com/blog/omnilingual-asr-advancing-automatic-speech-recognition)
- [Research paper](https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/omnilingual-asr-open-source-multilingual-speech-recognition-for-1600-languages/)
- [Omnilingual ASR corpus on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/omnilingual-asr-corpus)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-meta-lingual-sr-release)

### NVIDIA — ChronoEdit-14B Upscaler LoRA (Nov 13, 2025)

NVIDIA released an Upscaler LoRA for its ChronoEdit-14B image editing model, available on Hugging Face with Diffusers pipeline support. It adds high-quality upscaling to the ChronoEdit physics-aware editing stack.

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/HuanLing6/status/1988098676838060246)
- [Hugging Face model page](https://huggingface.co/NVIDIA/ChronoEdit-14B-Diffusers-Upscaler-LoRA)
- [Diffusers ChronoEdit docs](https://huggingface.co/docs/diffusers/main/en/api/pipelines/chronoedit)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.1 (Nov 13, 2025)

OpenAI shipped GPT-5.1, an update to its flagship model focused on a warmer tone and personality upgrades. The panel discussed how the friendlier default voice changes day-to-day ChatGPT use and what it signals for the frontier model race.

- [Fidji Simo announcement on X](https://x.com/fidjissimo/status/1988683216681889887)
- [Sam Altman on X](https://x.com/sama/status/1988692165686620237)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-big-companies-and-apis)

### WeiboAI — VibeThinker-1.5B (Nov 13, 2025)

Weibo's AI team open-sourced VibeThinker-1.5B, a tiny reasoning model that reportedly outperforms much larger models like DeepSeek R1 on select reasoning benchmarks. Part of a week where small open-weights models from Chinese labs kept punching above their weight.

- [WeiboLLM announcement on X](https://x.com/WeiboLLM/status/1988109435902832896)
- [Hugging Face model page](https://huggingface.co/WeiboAI/VibeThinker-1.5B)
- [Arxiv paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06221)
- [VentureBeat coverage](https://venturebeat.com/ai/weibos-new-open-source-ai-model-vibethinker-1-5b-outperforms-deepseek-r1-on)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

### Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) — OlmoEarth (Nov 6, 2025)

Ai2 launched OlmoEarth, a family of foundation models plus an open, end-to-end platform for fast, high-resolution Earth intelligence. It applies the lab's open-model approach to geospatial and remote-sensing data, making Earth observation workloads accessible without proprietary stacks.

- [X](https://x.com/allen_ai/status/1985719070407176577)
- [Blog](https://allenai.org/blog/olmoearth?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=olmoearth)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

### Inworld AI — Inworld TTS (Nov 6, 2025)

Inworld released a new version of its TTS model that claimed the #1 position on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech benchmark. It featured in the episode's voice segment as evidence that commercial TTS quality keeps climbing fast.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-voice-and-n8n-automation)

### Maya Research — Maya-1 (Nov 6, 2025)

Maya-1 is a new open-source voice generation model that was demoed on the show as part of the week's voice AI wave. The panel highlighted how quickly open voice model quality is improving, with expressive output that holds up against commercial systems.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-voice-and-n8n-automation)

### Meituan (LongCat) — LongCat Flash Omni (Nov 6, 2025)

Meituan's LongCat team released LongCat Flash Omni, a 560B-parameter mixture-of-experts model with roughly 27B active parameters that accepts text, audio, and video input. It extends the open LongCat Flash line into omni-modal territory from a lab better known for food delivery than frontier models.

- [X](https://x.com/Meituan_LongCat/status/1984398560973242733)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/meituan-longca)
- [Announcement](https://github.com/meituan-longca)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

### Moonshot AI — Kimi K2 Thinking (Nov 6, 2025)

Moonshot AI released Kimi K2 Thinking, an open-source 1-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts reasoning agent with 256K context and large-scale tool-calling capacity. The panel treated it as the open-source centerpiece of the week, focusing on its reasoning quality and coding utility rather than just benchmark screenshots, and as a sign open models keep closing the usability gap with frontier closed models.

- [X](https://x.com/Kimi_Moonshot/status/1986449512538513505)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Thinking)
- [Tech Blog](https://moonshotai.github.io/Kimi-K2/thinking.html)
- [Arxiv](https://huggingface.co/papers/2510.26692)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-kimi-k2-thinking)

## Products & Apps

### LTX Studio (Lightricks) — LTX Retake (Nov 27, 2025)

LTX Studio launched Retake, an AI video editing tool that enables inpainting-style editing of specific objects within video frames. Wolfram called it 'the image editing moment for video' — Photoshop for video, available to try on Replicate.

- [LTX Retake on Replicate](https://replicate.com/lightricks/ltx-2-retake)
- [LTX Retake Announcement on X](https://x.com/LTXStudio/status/1993715247031767298)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-vision-video)

### Weights & Biases — Serverless LoRA Inference (Nov 27, 2025)

Weights & Biases launched Serverless LoRA Inference on CoreWeave: upload a LoRA adapter to W&B Artifacts and serve it instantly on top of any supported base model with no cold starts and no dedicated GPU instances. Alex demoed a 'Mocking SpongeBob' LoRA he trained in 25 minutes, served on a Qwen 2.5 base.

- [W&B Serverless LoRA Report](https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/llm_tools/reports/Serverless-LoRA-inference-on-W-B-CoreWeave--Vmlldzo5MjUwNzAx)
- [W&B LoRA Notebook](https://wandb.me/lora_nb)
- [W&B Announcement on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/1993032159985385978)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-this-weeks-buzz)

### Sandbar — Stream / Stream Ring (Nov 6, 2025)

Sandbar launched Stream, a voice-first personal assistant, alongside Stream Ring, a wearable described as a 'mouse for voice' that is now available for preorder. The pairing pushes always-available voice interaction into dedicated hardware rather than the phone.

- [X](https://x.com/sandbar/status/1986112726889078911)
- [Blog](https://www.sandbar.com/stream)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-voice-and-n8n-automation)

### XPeng — Iron (Nov 6, 2025)

XPeng unveiled Iron, a humanoid robot it claims has the most human-like design yet, featuring soft skin, bionic muscles, and a VLT (vision-language-task) brain. The company says it plans to put Iron into production in 2026, putting a Chinese EV maker squarely in the humanoid race.

- [X](https://x.com/humanoidsdaily/1986063827327201757)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Voice Mode (Nov 27, 2025)

OpenAI integrated ChatGPT's Voice Mode directly into the chat interface instead of a separate full-screen experience. Users can now talk to ChatGPT while seeing transcripts and visual responses inline in the conversation.

- [OpenAI Voice Mode Announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1993381101369458763)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025)

### OpenAI — GPT-5.1 Pro (Nov 20, 2025)

OpenAI also shipped GPT-5.1 Pro, a new research-grade ChatGPT mode that will happily think for minutes on a single query. It targets hard research-style questions where extended deliberation pays off, rounding out OpenAI's big week alongside Codex-Max.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini Live (Nov 13, 2025)

Google rolled out an upgrade to Gemini Live's voice capabilities, making conversations more natural. Covered in the big-companies roundup alongside GPT-5.1 and Grok 4 Fast as the voice interface race heats up.

- [Gemini Live upgrade on X](https://x.com/carlovarrasi/status/1988691309591425234)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-big-companies-and-apis)

### xAI — Grok 4 Fast (Nov 13, 2025)

xAI's Grok 4 Fast now supports a 2 million token context window, one of the largest of any frontier model. The crew called the jump 'crazy' and discussed what such long context unlocks for agentic and document-heavy workloads.

**2M** Context Window

- [Grok 4 Fast 2M context on X](https://x.com/chatgpt21/status/1987976808562589946)
- [Grok update thread on X](https://x.com/cowowhite/status/1988213138333069314)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-big-companies-and-apis)

### Cursor — Cursor in-IDE browser (Nov 6, 2025)

Cursor added an in-IDE browser, letting developers preview and interact with their running app without leaving the editor. The panel called out how performant the implementation is, tightening the loop between agentic code edits and visual verification.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

### Windsurf (Cognition) — Codemaps (Nov 6, 2025)

Cognition's Windsurf launched Codemaps, AI-annotated and navigable maps of a codebase powered by SWE-1.5 for fast mode and Claude Sonnet 4.5 for smart mode. It aims to help developers and agents build a structural understanding of large repos instead of navigating file by file.

- [X](https://x.com/cognition/1985755284527010167)
- [Announcement](https://cognition.ai/blog/codemaps)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

## APIs & Platforms

### xAI — Grok 4.1 Fast + Agent Tools API (Nov 20, 2025)

Launched as breaking news during the show, Grok 4.1 Fast pairs a 2 million token context window with a new Agent Tools API offering native X search, Reddit search, web browsing, and code execution. Benchmarks are striking: 93-100% on tau2-Bench Telecom and 72% on Berkeley Function Calling v4 (top of the leaderboard) at $0.20/$0.50 per million tokens — roughly 10x cheaper than competitors, and free for the first two weeks on the xAI API and OpenRouter.

**93–100%** τ²-Bench Telecom · **72%** Berkeley Function Calling v4 · **2M** Token context window

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-grok-agent-tools)

## Dev Tools

### Google DeepMind — Antigravity (Nov 20, 2025)

A free VS Code fork reimagined for agent-first coding, with an inbox-style Agent Manager for running multiple coding agents in parallel across a codebase. Browser integration lets agents control Chrome, take screenshots and videos of the running app, and self-debug. The free tier is powered by Gemini 3 Pro, with GPT-OSS 120B as the open-source alternative and Nano Banana for images.

- [Antigravity IDE](https://antigravity.dev)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-antigravity-ide)

### Marimo — Marimo VS Code / Cursor extension (Nov 20, 2025)

Marimo released a new VS Code and Cursor extension bringing its reactive Python notebooks directly into the editor, with UV integration for dependency management. It was highlighted in the open-source roundup as a notable dev-tool release of the week.

- [Marimo VS Code / Cursor extension](https://marimo.io)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - the week that changed the AI landscape forever - Gemini 3, GPT codex max, Grok 4.1 & fast, SAM3 and Nano Banana Pro](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-20-2025#sec-meta-sam-open-source)

### Weights & Biases — W&B LEET (Nov 13, 2025)

Weights & Biases released LEET (Lightweight Experiment Exploration Tool), an open-source terminal-native dashboard for tracking ML runs, demoed live by Dima Duev of the SDK team. It works fully offline for air-gapped HPC clusters and brings real-time metrics, system stats, and zoomable interactive charts to the terminal.

- [W&B announcement on X](https://x.com/wandb/status/1988401253156876418)
- [W&B LEET blog post](https://app.getbeamer.com/wandb/en/meet-wb-leet-a-new-terminal-ui-for-weights-biases-JXSFhyt2)
- [W&B LEET (wandb beta leet)](https://wandb.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-weights-biases-leet-demo)

## Datasets

### Inference.net — Project AELLA (OSSAS) (Nov 13, 2025)

Project AELLA (also called OSSAS) released 100,000 LLM-generated structured summaries of scientific papers, published openly on Hugging Face. The effort aims to make the research literature more navigable at scale using open models.

- [Sam Hogan announcement on X](https://x.com/samhogan/status/1988306424309706938)
- [Inference.net on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/inference-net)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Laude Institute / Stanford — Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Nov 13, 2025)

Terminal-Bench 2.0 launched alongside the Harbor framework, with 89 hard, realistic terminal-based tasks built with around 1000 Discord contributors. The Warp agent tops the leaderboard at 50% with Codex CLI close behind, and the panel argued an unsaturated 50% ceiling makes it far more meaningful than near-saturated benchmarks like MMLU.

**50%** Terminal Bench v2 Top Score

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/alexgshaw/status/1986911106108211461)
- [Harbor framework](https://harborframework.com/)
- [Running Terminal-Bench docs](https://harborframework.com/docs/running-tbench)
- [Terminal-Bench leaderboard](https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-terminal-bench-deep-dive)

### LMArena (LMSYS) — Code Arena (Nov 13, 2025)

LMArena launched Code Arena, a live evaluation platform where models build real applications agentically and humans vote on the results. It extends the arena-style crowdsourced ranking approach to agentic coding workflows.

- [Arena announcement on X](https://x.com/arena/status/1988665193275240616)
- [Code Arena blog post](https://arena.lmsys.org/blog/code-arena)
- [Code Arena](https://arena.lmsys.org/)
- Podcast coverage: [GPT‑5.1’s New Brain, Grok’s 2M Context, Omnilingual ASR, and a Terminal UI That Sparks Joy](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-13-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

## Also Released

### Model Context Protocol (Anthropic + OpenAI) — MCP Apps (Nov 27, 2025)

MCP-UI, created by Ido Salomon and Liad Yosef, was standardized as 'MCP Apps' — an official MCP extension jointly adopted by Anthropic and OpenAI that unifies MCP-UI with what OpenAI called Operator Plugins. Agents can now render full interactive HTML UIs directly inside chat, avoiding iOS-vs-Android style fragmentation with one open standard.

- [MCP Apps Blog Post](https://blog.modelcontextprotocol.io/posts/2025-11-21-mcp-apps-extending-servers-with-interactive-user-interfaces)
- [MCP-UI / MCP Apps Website](https://mcpui.dev)
- [MCP Apps Announcement on X](https://x.com/idosal1/status/1992636462186029233)
- Podcast coverage: [🦃 ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs 🍌, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-27-2025#sec-mcp-apps)

### Anthropic — Code execution with MCP (Nov 6, 2025)

Anthropic published an engineering post showing how running MCP-connected tools as code, instead of direct tool calls, slashes token use and scales agents to many more tools. The approach echoes Cloudflare's Code Mode and framed the episode's interview with Kenton Varda about agents writing code against tool APIs.

- [X](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/1985846791842250860)
- [Blog](https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/code-execution-with-mcp)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-kenton-code-mode-cloudflare-workers)

### Amazon Web Services — AWS-OpenAI infrastructure partnership (Nov 6, 2025)

AWS announced a multi-year strategic infrastructure partnership with OpenAI to power ChatGPT inference, training, and agentic AI workloads. It is another sign of OpenAI spreading its compute needs across every major cloud provider, and a notable win for AWS in the frontier-AI infrastructure race.

- [X](https://x.com/ajassy/1985351258333643172)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025#sec-big-tech-perplexity)

### Hugging Face — Smol Training Playbook (Nov 6, 2025)

Hugging Face published the Smol Training Playbook, a 200+ page end-to-end guide to reliably pretraining and operating LLMs. It distills the team's practical experience from the SmolLM line into an open resource for anyone training their own models.

- [X](https://x.com/eliebakouch/1983930328751153159)
- [Announcement](https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Nov 6, 2025 - Kimi’s 1T Thinking Model Shakes Up Open Source, Apple Bets $1B on Gemini for Siri, and Amazon vs. Perplexity!](https://thursdai.news/ep/nov-06-2025)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in November 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-11), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-11 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in October 2025

> 51 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-10


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Cartesia — Sonic 3 (Oct 30, 2025)

Cartesia launched Sonic 3, a real-time text-to-speech model that adds expressive emotion and natural laughter, announced alongside a $100M funding round. Co-founder Arjun Desai joined the show to break down the voice stack and why state-space-model approaches enable this latency and expressiveness.

**$100M** funding round announced alongside the launch

- [X announcement](https://x.com/krandiash/status/1983202316397453676)
- [Sonic website](https://cartesia.ai/sonic)
- [Docs](https://docs.cartesia.ai/2024-11-13/get-started/overview)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-cartesia-and-video-voice)

### Cognition — SWE-1.5 (Oct 30, 2025)

Cognition released SWE-1.5, a fast agentic coding model that serves around 950 tokens per second and scores about 40% on SWE-bench Pro. It ships inside Windsurf and reinforces the week's theme of speed-focused coding models from agent labs.

**950** tokens per second · **40%** SWE-bench Pro

- [Blog: SWE-1.5](https://cognition.ai/blog/swe-1-5)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/cognition/status/1983662836896448756)
- [Windsurf download](https://windsurf.com/download)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-agent-tools-and-products)

### IBM — Granite 4.0 Nano (Oct 30, 2025)

IBM released Granite 4.0 Nano, a set of ultra-efficient tiny open models aimed at edge deployment. The release continues the trend of capable sub-billion-to-few-billion parameter models that can run locally on constrained hardware.

- [Artificial Analysis on X](https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1983611955668775411)
- [Artificial Analysis: Granite](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/granite)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-opening-and-tldr)

### InclusionAI (Ant Group) — Ming-flash-omni Preview (Oct 30, 2025)

Ant Group's InclusionAI team released Ming-flash-omni Preview, a sparse mixture-of-experts omni-modal model on Hugging Face. It handles multiple input and output modalities in a single open-weights model, adding to the wave of Chinese open omni-modal releases.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/AntLingAGI/status/1982831211312722041)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI/Ming-flash-omni-Preview)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-opening-and-tldr)

### MiniMax (Hailuo) — Hailuo 2.3 (Oct 30, 2025)

MiniMax's Hailuo team released version 2.3 of its video generation model, pitching cinema-grade output quality. It landed in the same week as MiniMax M2 and Speech 2.6, underlining how broadly MiniMax is shipping across text, voice, and video.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Hailuo_AI/status/1983016390878708131)
- [Hailuo 2.3 examples](https://x.com/Hailuo_AI/status/1983382728343994414)
- [Model details](https://x.com/Hailuo_AI/status/1983964920493568296)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-cartesia-and-video-voice)

### MiniMax — MiniMax M2 (Oct 30, 2025)

MiniMax released M2, an open-source agentic model positioned at roughly 8% of Claude's price while running about twice as fast. Head of Engineering Skyler Miao joined the show for a deep dive, framing M2 as both a model story and a speed story, and the panel read it as part of a broader open-model pressure wave on frontier labs.

**8%** of Claude's price · **2x** speed vs comparable frontier models

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MiniMax__AI/status/1982674798649160175)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-minimax-m2-deep-dive)

### MiniMax — MiniMax Speech 2.6 (Oct 30, 2025)

MiniMax released Speech 2.6, a voice model targeting ultra-human quality with end-to-end latency under 250ms, available through the MiniMax platform API. It slots into the episode's voice arms race alongside Cartesia's Sonic 3.

**<250ms** latency

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Hailuo_AI/status/1983557055819768108)
- [MiniMax audio](https://minimaxi.com/audio)
- [API docs](https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/sp)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-cartesia-and-video-voice)

### Moonshot AI (Kimi) — Kimi Linear (Oct 30, 2025)

Moonshot AI released Kimi Linear, a 48B parameter (A3B active) instruct model that uses linear attention to reach a 1M token context window. It is an open-weights bet on efficient long-context architectures from the Kimi team.

**48B** parameters (3B active) · **1M** token context window

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-opening-and-tldr)

### OpenAI — GPT-OSS-Safeguard (Oct 30, 2025)

OpenAI released GPT-OSS-Safeguard, its first open-weight safety reasoning models, built on the GPT-OSS family. The models let developers apply custom safety policies via reasoning rather than fixed classifiers, extending OpenAI's open-weights push into the trust-and-safety layer.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1983507392374641071)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/openai/gpt-oss-safeguard)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-opening-and-tldr)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-VL 2B & 32B (Oct 23, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team extended the Qwen3-VL family with newly updated 2B and 32B checkpoints. The 2B is a generic VLM (OCR-capable) that holds up against its 4B and 8B siblings from prior weeks, while the 32B reportedly outperforms GPT-5 mini and Claude 4 Sonnet on benchmarks.

- [X](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1980665932625383868)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen3-VL)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-deepseek-and-open-models)

### Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) — olmOCR 2 7B (Oct 23, 2025)

The Allen Institute for AI updated its open OCR line with olmOCR 2 at 7B (released as an FP8 checkpoint), landing in the same week as DeepSeek-OCR, Qwen3-VL, and Liquid's LFM2-VL. Another sign that document understanding became this week's hottest open-model category.

- [X](https://x.com/allen_ai/status/1981029159267659821)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/allenai/olmOCR-2-7B-1025-FP8)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-deepseek-and-open-models)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek-OCR (Oct 23, 2025)

DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek-OCR, a 3B model (~570M active parameters) that is less an OCR model and more a context-compression breakthrough: it renders text as images, compresses it up to 10x while retaining 97% decoding accuracy (60% even at 20x), and reads it back with a tiny vision decoder. The approach suggests text tokenization is far from optimal and points at vastly cheaper long-context processing; alphaXiv reportedly OCR'd all of arXiv for $1000 versus $7500 with MistralOCR, and a single H100 can process up to 200K pages.

**97%** decoding accuracy at 10x compression · **~570M** active parameters (3B total) · **200K** pages scannable on a single H100

- [X](https://x.com/Presidentlin/status/1980159652563415094)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR)
- [Paper](https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-OCR/blob/main/DeepSeek_OCR_paper.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-deepseek-and-open-models)

### Krea AI — Krea Realtime Video (Oct 23, 2025)

Krea AI open-sourced a 14-billion-parameter real-time video model, with weights on Hugging Face. It joins the week's clear trend of generative video racing toward live, interactive experiences rather than offline rendering.

**14B** parameters

- [X](https://x.com/krea_ai/status/1980358158376988747)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/krea/krea-realtime-video)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-video-releases-and-weekly-buzz)

### Lightricks — LTX-2 (Oct 23, 2025)

Lightricks announced LTX-2 as breaking news on the show: a video generation engine producing native 4K video (no upscaling) with synchronized audio, positioned as a fast, efficient open alternative to closed models like Sora. It is billed as open-source with weights coming this fall.

**4K** native generation resolution, no upscaling

- [X](https://x.com/ltx_model/status/1981377626347323480)
- [Website](https://ltx.studio/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Lightricks/LTX-Video)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-video-releases-and-weekly-buzz)

### Liquid AI — LFM2-VL-3B (Oct 23, 2025)

Liquid AI released LFM2-VL-3B, a tiny multilingual vision-language model, part of a wave of OCR-and-VLM releases this week. It targets efficient on-device and edge vision-language workloads at the 3B scale.

- [X](https://x.com/LiquidAI_/status/1980985540196393211)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/liquidai/lfm2-vl-3b)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-deepseek-and-open-models)

### Pokee AI — PokeeResearch-7B (Oct 23, 2025)

Pokee AI released PokeeResearch-7B, an open-source 7B deep research agent model claiming state-of-the-art results for its size. Weights, code, a paper, and a hosted deep-research preview all shipped together.

- [X](https://x.com/Pokee_AI/status/1981040897346179256)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/PokeeAI/pokee_research_7b)
- [ArXiv](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15862.pdf)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Pokee-AI/PokeeResearchOSS)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-deepseek-and-open-models)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-VL 3B/8B (Oct 16, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team released smaller Qwen3-VL vision-language models in 3B and 8B sizes, bringing the flagship VL capabilities down to edge- and laptop-friendly scales. Weights are open on Hugging Face as part of the Qwen3-VL collection.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1978150959621734624)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qw)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### Anthropic — Claude Haiku 4.5 (Oct 16, 2025)

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, its smallest and fastest current-generation model. The show highlighted that it approaches Sonnet 4 level accuracy at a fraction of the cost and latency, making it attractive for high-volume agentic and production workloads.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/claudeai/status/1978505436358697052)
- [Official blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-claude-haiku-4-5)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### Baidu — MuseStreamer (Oct 16, 2025)

Baidu showed off MuseStreamer, a video generation model producing clips longer than 20 seconds. It adds another Chinese lab to the long-form video generation race alongside Veo and Sora.

- [Baidu on X](https://x.com/Baidu_Inc/status/1978505872805658960)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-ai-engineer-and-video-models)

### Cognition — SWE-grep (Oct 16, 2025)

Cognition released SWE-grep, an RL-trained multi-turn context retriever that finds relevant code for agentic coding tasks far faster than full agent loops. It powers fast context retrieval in Cognition's products, and a public playground lets developers try it on real repos.

- [Blog](https://cognition.ai/blog/swe-grep)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/cognition/status/1978867021669413252)
- [Playground](https://playground.cognition.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-ai-engineer-and-video-models)

### Google DeepMind — C2S-Scale 27B (Oct 16, 2025)

Google released C2S-Scale 27B, a Gemma-based single-cell biology model that generated a novel cancer therapy hypothesis later validated in living cells. The show called this a bombshell example of AI contributing to real scientific discovery rather than just benchmarks.

- [Sundar Pichai on X](https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1978507110477332582)
- [Google Blog](https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemma-ai-cancer-therapy-discovery/)
- [Paper (bioRxiv)](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.14.648850v2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### Google DeepMind — Veo 3.1 (Oct 16, 2025)

Google DeepMind shipped Veo 3.1, the next version of its video generation model with improved quality and cinematic audio. Senior PM Jessica Gallegos joined the show to discuss how the model and its product packaging (including Flow) are evolving video generation into a real user experience story.

- [Google Developers Blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-veo31-and-frontier-models)

### KAIST — KORMo 10B (Oct 16, 2025)

KAIST published KORMo, a 10B parameter fully open bilingual model for Korean and English, with weights on Hugging Face and an accompanying paper. It continues the trend of strong national-language open models coming out of Korean labs.

- [Hugging Face](https://t.co/kDIylkn5pC)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09426)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### OpenPipe (Weights & Biases) — OpenPipe Qwen3 14B Instruct (Oct 16, 2025)

OpenPipe, now part of Weights & Biases / CoreWeave, released a Qwen3 14B instruct model available through W&B Inference. Co-founder Kyle Corbitt joined the show to talk RL, Serverless RL, and practical agent evaluation and deployment.

- [W&B Inference model page](https://wandb.ai/site/inference/cw_openpipe_qwen3-14b-instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-openpipe-and-agent-evals)

### Sourceful — Riverflow 1 (Oct 16, 2025)

Sourceful's Riverflow 1 image-editing model took the top spot on the image-editing leaderboard. It is a notable result from a smaller lab in a category dominated by big-name image models.

- [Sourceful blog](https://www.sourceful.com/blog/riverflow-1)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025)

### World Labs — RTFM (Oct 16, 2025)

World Labs released RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model), a generative world model that renders explorable, persistent 3D worlds at interactive frame rates on a single H100 GPU. A live demo lets anyone walk through generated worlds in the browser.

- [Blog](https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/rtfm)
- [Demo](https://rtfm.worldlabs.ai/)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/theworldlabs/status/1978839171058815380)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-ai-engineer-and-video-models)

## Products & Apps

### 1X Technologies — NEO (Oct 30, 2025)

1X Technologies opened orders for NEO, billed as the first consumer humanoid robot for the home, priced at $20,000 with deliveries starting in 2026. The panel treated it as a signal that home humanoid timelines are no longer purely sci-fi, anchoring the episode's 2026 robot revolution theme.

**$20k** price · **2026** delivery year

- [X announcement](https://x.com/1x_tech/status/1983233494575952138)
- [Order page](https://www.1x.tech/order)
- [Keynote](https://youtu.be/LTYMWadOW7c)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-openai-roadmap-and-robots)

### Cursor — Cursor 2.0 & Composer (Oct 30, 2025)

Cursor released version 2.0 of its AI code editor alongside Composer, a new in-house coding model claimed to be about 4x faster. The launch came up as evidence that developer products are being rebuilt agent-first, with speed and orchestration as the new battleground.

**4x** faster coding claimed

- [Cursor on X](https://x.com/cursor_ai)
- [Blog: Cursor 2.0](https://cursor.com/blog/2-0)
- [Speculation on Composer's base model](https://x.com/auchenberg/status/1983901551048470974)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-agent-tools-and-products)

### Google (Labs) — Pomelli (Oct 30, 2025)

Google Labs released Pomelli, an experimental AI marketing agent that generates on-brand campaigns and marketing assets for businesses. It was covered in the tools section as another sign of agents moving into specific professional workflows.

- [TestingCatalog on X](https://twitter.com/testingcatalog/status/1983214036259938553)
- [Google Labs: Pomelli](https://labs.google.com/pomelli/about/?ref=testingcatalog.com)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-agent-tools-and-products)

### Odyssey ML — Odyssey V2 (Oct 30, 2025)

Odyssey ML launched V2 of its real-time interactive AI video experience, where the video stream is generated live and responds to user input. The panel grouped it with the week's evidence that video is becoming an interactive product surface rather than a render-and-wait demo.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/odysseyml/status/1982856110290939989)
- [Experience it live](https://experience.odyssey.ml)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-cartesia-and-video-voice)

### Perplexity — Email Assistant (Oct 30, 2025)

Perplexity launched an Email Assistant that manages your inbox with a privacy-first pitch, drafting replies and triaging mail. It extends Perplexity's push from search into day-to-day agentic productivity surfaces.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/perplexity_ai/status/1983591113903738970)
- [Assistant site](https://www.perplexity.ai/assistant)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-agent-tools-and-products)

### Anthropic — Claude Code on the Web (Oct 23, 2025)

Anthropic brought Claude Code to the web, letting developers delegate software tasks through a browser with GitHub integration, secure sandboxed execution, multi-repo support, and automatic pull requests, making it usable even from a phone. The Claude desktop app was also upgraded with screen context via screenshots, file sharing, and a new voice mode.

- [X](https://x.com/btibor91/status/1980340485152715095)
- [Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-on-the-web)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025)

### Browserbase — Director 2.0 (Oct 23, 2025)

Browserbase launched Director 2.0, a prompt-powered web automation platform that performs a task from natural language and hands back a repeatable, deployable script. Its standout innovation is delegated, per-site authentication via a 1Password integration: cloud agents request login approval on your local machine site-by-site instead of getting master-key access to all sessions, a much safer model than Atlas-style all-or-nothing access.

- [X](https://x.com/pk_iv/status/1980653648310071663)
- [Director.ai](https://director.ai/?ref=producthunt)
- [Stagehand](https://stagehand.dev/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-browserbase-and-authentication)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Atlas (Oct 23, 2025)

OpenAI shipped Atlas, a Chromium-based browser deeply integrated with ChatGPT: natural-language history search, a 'Cursor' inline text-rewrite tool, browsing-pattern memories, and an Ask ChatGPT sidepane. Its agent mode runs with your logged-in sessions and cookies, enabling long multi-step tasks (Alex had it complete a 5-hour compliance training) but raising prompt-injection security concerns that OpenAI's CISO addressed publicly. macOS only at launch, for Pro, Plus, and Go tiers.

- [X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1980685602384441368)
- [Download](https://chatgpt.com/atlas/get-started/)
- [Security note from CISO](https://x.com/cryps1s/status/1981037851279278414)
- [Simon Willison's breakdown](https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/openai-ciso-on-atlas/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-atlas-browser-wars)

### Apple — M5 chip (Oct 16, 2025)

Apple unveiled the M5 chip, claiming roughly double the AI performance of the previous generation for Apple Silicon. For local-model enthusiasts on the show, it means more on-device headroom for running and fine-tuning models on Macs.

- [Apple Newsroom](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unleashes-m5-the-next-big-leap-in-ai-performance-for-apple-silicon/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-agent-products-and-devtools)

### NVIDIA — DGX Spark (Oct 16, 2025)

NVIDIA started shipping DGX Spark, a desktop personal AI supercomputer aimed at prototyping and local inference. The show pointed to the LMSYS deep dive on its real-world performance, and Alex shared his own first impressions of the device.

- [LMSYS Blog deep dive](https://lmsys.org/blog/2025-10-13-nvidia-dgx-spark/)
- [Alex's impressions on X](https://x.com/altryne/status/1978569726734545009)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-agent-products-and-devtools)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — Sora (Character Cameos) (Oct 30, 2025)

OpenAI removed the invite requirement for the Sora app and shipped Character Cameos, letting users create reusable characters that can appear across generated videos. The update widens access to Sora as OpenAI pushes it as a consumer video product.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1983661036533379486)
- [Sonia cameo example](https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_6902d8b223d88191a04adfada2e9f5b5)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-cartesia-and-video-voice)

### Google DeepMind — AI Studio Vibe Coding (Oct 23, 2025)

Google's Gemini AI Studio launched a 'Vibe Coding' experience at ai.studio/build, letting users build apps from natural-language prompts with Gemini. It puts Google into the rapidly crowding prompt-to-app space alongside the week's other coding-agent moves.

- [X](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1980674135693971550)
- [AI Studio Build](https://ai.studio/build)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025)

### Microsoft — Edge Copilot Mode (agentic) (Oct 23, 2025)

Microsoft answered Atlas with agentic enhancements to Copilot Mode in Edge, including a voice mode that can see and discuss the current page, plus broader Copilot updates (and Clippy back as an easter egg via the Mico avatar). In Alex's hands-on testing the agentic features did not actually work, so real-world parity with Atlas and Comet is unproven.

- [X](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/1981390345578697199)
- [X (Edge)](https://x.com/MicrosoftEdge/status/1981028712830185914)
- [Clippy easter egg](https://x.com/satyanadella/status/1981466897557196837)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-atlas-browser-wars)

### Reve — Reve video mode (Oct 23, 2025)

Reve's unannounced video mode was spotted this week, generating 1080p video with sound. It was covered briefly in the show's vision and video roundup with no official announcement or links yet.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-video-releases-and-weekly-buzz)

### Amp — Amp Free (Oct 16, 2025)

Amp (from the Sourcegraph team) launched a free tier for its coding agent, funded by ads and surplus model capacity. CEO Quinn Slack joined the show to explain the economics and the product thinking behind ad-supported AI dev tooling.

- [Amp Free](https://ampcode.com/free)
- [Quinn Slack on X](https://x.com/sqs/status/1978521044194398713)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-openpipe-and-agent-evals)

### Anthropic — Claude Skills (Oct 16, 2025)

Anthropic launched Claude Skills, folders of instructions and resources that Claude loads on demand to specialize agents for specific tasks. The panel treated it as a major piece of the emerging builder stack, with Simon Willison arguing Skills could be a bigger deal than MCP.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/claudeai/status/1978855432123723909)
- [Anthropic News](https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills)
- [YouTube Demo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoqpBKrNaZI)
- [Simon Willison: a bigger deal than MCPs](https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-agent-products-and-devtools)

### Microsoft — Windows 11 Copilot Voice (Oct 16, 2025)

Microsoft announced that every Windows 11 machine becomes an 'AI PC,' adding 'Hey Copilot' voice input and deeper agentic Copilot integration at the OS level. The panel discussed it as a sign of AI assistants moving into the default computing experience.

- [Zac Bowden on X](https://x.com/zacbowden/status/1978822883217461388)
- [Windows Blog](https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2025/10/16/making-every-windows-11-pc-an-ai-pc/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Memory (Oct 16, 2025)

OpenAI updated ChatGPT's memory system so it automatically manages and prioritizes saved memories, eliminating the 'memory full' dead end. The change makes long-running personalized use of ChatGPT smoother without manual memory pruning.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1978608684088643709)
- [Memory FAQ](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8590148-memory-faq)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

### OpenAI — Sora (Oct 16, 2025)

OpenAI upgraded Sora with longer generations, up to 15 seconds for standard users and 25 seconds for Pro, plus a new storyboard feature for multi-shot control. The update keeps Sora competitive as video models race on length and controllability.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-ai-engineer-and-video-models)

## APIs & Platforms

### Decart AI — Real-Time Lip Sync API (Oct 23, 2025)

Decart AI released a real-time lip-sync API that modifies an avatar's video frames to match generated speech on the fly. Kwindla Kramer broke down the pipeline on the show: WebRTC audio capture, Whisper transcription, an LLM response, ElevenLabs voice generation, then Decart's model syncing the avatar's lips, all at sub-two-second latency, a key step toward interactive, believable AI characters.

**<2s** end-to-end pipeline latency

- [X](https://x.com/DecartAI/status/1981078296084488293)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-real-time-voice-and-lip-sync)

## Dev Tools

### Pokee AI — Pokee (Oct 30, 2025)

Pokee AI launched Pokee, an agentic workflow builder for chaining AI actions into automated workflows. It was covered in the tools rundown as part of the expanding agent-first builder stack.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Pokee_AI/status/1983202159262150717)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025#sec-agent-tools-and-products)

### Meta AI (PyTorch) — TorchForge (Oct 23, 2025)

Meta's PyTorch team, in collaboration with Weights & Biases/CoreWeave and Stanford, introduced TorchForge, a PyTorch-native library for scalable reinforcement-learning post-training and agent development. Built for massive GPU runs (W&B/CoreWeave provided 520 H100s) and competing with Ray via tools like the Monarch scheduler.

**520** H100s provided for development runs

- [Blog](https://pytorch.org/blog/introducing-torchforge/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 23: The AI Browser Wars Begin, DeepSeek's OCR Mind-Trick & The Race to Real-Time Video](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-23-2025#sec-video-releases-and-weekly-buzz)

## Papers & Research

### Insta360 Research — DiT360 (Oct 16, 2025)

DiT360 is a diffusion-transformer approach to panoramic image generation that uses hybrid training across perspective and panoramic data to reach state-of-the-art quality. The project page and GitHub release make the work reproducible.

- [Project page](https://fenghora.github.io/DiT360-Page/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Insta360-Resea)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025)

## Acquisitions

### CoreWeave — Marimo (Oct 30, 2025)

CoreWeave, the parent company of Weights & Biases, acquired Marimo, makers of the open-source reactive Python notebook. Covered in the This Week's Buzz segment, the deal brings a popular developer notebook tool into CoreWeave's AI cloud stack.

- [Marimo announcement on X](https://x.com/marimo_io/status/1983916371869364622)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-30-2025)

## Also Released

### OpenAI — OpenAI x Broadcom custom accelerators (Oct 16, 2025)

OpenAI announced a strategic collaboration with Broadcom to co-develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI accelerators. It is another massive compute commitment in OpenAI's infrastructure buildout, this time with chips designed in-house.

- [Official announcement](https://openai.com/index/openai-and-broadcom-announce-strategic-collaboration/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/oct-16-2025#sec-frontier-model-week)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in October 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-10), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-10 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in September 2025

> 51 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-09


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-Omni (Sep 25, 2025)

Alongside Qwen3-VL, Alibaba released Qwen3-Omni, an end-to-end omni-modal open-weights model that takes text, image, audio, and video input and can respond with streaming speech. The show treated it as direct evidence of how fast open multimodal systems are improving, with weights on Hugging Face, a GitHub repo, demos, and availability in Qwen Chat and the Model Studio API.

- [HF](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-omni-68d100a86cd0906843ceccbe)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-Omni)
- [Qwen Chat](https://chat.qwen.ai/?models=qwen3-omni-flash)
- [Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-Omni-Demo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-TTS-Flash (Sep 25, 2025)

Part of the same Qwen release streak, Qwen3-TTS-Flash is a low-latency multilingual text-to-speech model with multiple voices and dialect support, offered through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio's API rather than as open weights. It fed into the episode's closing audio-demo pileup, where voice launches were treated as product proof points.

- [X](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1970599097297183035)
- [Blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=241398b9cd6353de490b0f82806c7848c5d2777d&from=research.latest-advancements-list)
- [API](https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/model-studio/models#c2d5833ae4jmo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-video-and-audio-pileup)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen3-VL (Sep 25, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team shipped Qwen3-VL, its new flagship open-weights vision-language family, headlining the episode's 'Qwen-mas' barrage. The panel discussed it as a practical workflow tool for visual understanding and agentic GUI tasks, not just another model card, with weights, a blog post, and a Hugging Face demo all available at launch.

- [X](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1970594923503391182)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-vl-68d2a7c1b8a8afce4ebd2dbe)
- [Blog](https://qwen.ai/blog?id=99f0335c4ad9ff6153e517418d48535ab6d8afef&from=research.latest-advancements-list)
- [Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-VL-Demo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### Alibaba (Wan) — Wan 2.2 Animate (Sep 25, 2025)

Alibaba's Wan team released Wan 2.2 Animate, an open-weights model that animates a character image from a performance video, replicating motion and expressions, or swaps a character into existing footage. It landed in the episode's closing run of video releases showing multimodal product quality climbing across the board.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-video-and-audio-pileup)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus (Sep 25, 2025)

DeepSeek released V3.1 Terminus, an update to V3.1 with cleaner bilingual output, stronger agentic tool use, and cheaper long-context handling. The open weights are available on Hugging Face, continuing DeepSeek's cadence of iterative open releases.

- [X](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1968682364055920980)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.1-Terminus)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### IBM — Granite Docling 258M (Sep 25, 2025)

IBM published Granite Docling 258M, an ultra-compact open-source vision-language model for document understanding that converts documents into structured output. At just 258M parameters it reinforced the show's point that tiny specialized models are becoming genuinely useful workflow tools.

- [HF](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-docling-258M)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### Kling AI — Kling 2.5 Turbo (Sep 25, 2025)

Kuaishou's Kling AI shipped Kling 2.5 Turbo, an update to its video generation model with better motion, prompt adherence, and cinematic quality at a lower price. Together with Wan Animate it was cited on the show as proof that video model quality is being turbocharged this season.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-video-and-audio-pileup)

### Liquid AI — Liquid Nanos (Sep 25, 2025)

Liquid AI released Liquid Nanos, a family of very small task-specific models built for jobs like extraction, translation, RAG, and tool calling that can run on-device. The collection landed on Hugging Face, fitting the episode's theme of small-but-capable models powering real products.

- [X](https://x.com/LiquidAI_/status/1971198690707616157)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/collections/LiquidAI/liquid-nanos-68b98d898414dd94d4d5f99a)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### Meta AI — Code World Model (CWM) (Sep 25, 2025)

Meta released CWM, a 32B open-weights research model trained to internally model code execution, aimed at agentic code reasoning rather than plain code completion. The weights are on Hugging Face under facebook/cwm, giving the open-source community a new approach to code world modeling.

- [X](https://x.com/syhw/status/1838682364055920980)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/facebook/cwm)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-qwenmas-and-open-models)

### Moondream AI — Moondream 3 (Sep 25, 2025)

Moondream released a preview of Moondream 3, a small open vision-language model that punches well above its size class. CTO and co-founder Vik Korrapati joined the show to explain why small, capable vision models matter for real product building, framing Moondream 3 as a practical tool rather than a benchmark flex.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-moondream-and-vision-builders)

### Suno — Suno v5 (Sep 25, 2025)

Suno rolled out v5, its newest flagship music generation model with cleaner audio quality and more natural vocals. The live audio demos in the show's closing segment were treated as product proof points for how fast AI music quality is climbing.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-video-and-audio-pileup)

### xAI — Grok 4 Fast (Sep 25, 2025)

xAI released Grok 4 Fast, a cost-efficient model with a 2M token context window that unifies reasoning and non-reasoning behavior in one set of weights and prices far below Grok 4. The panel treated it as part of the larger competitive pressure cycle on price and speed among frontier labs.

- [X](https://x.com/xai/status/1969183326389858448)
- [Blog](https://x.ai/news/grok-4-fast)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-nvidia-openai-and-grok-fast)

### Alibaba (Tongyi Lab) — Tongyi DeepResearch 30B-A3B (Sep 18, 2025)

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab open-sourced Tongyi DeepResearch, a 30B mixture-of-experts web research agent with only 3B active parameters. The lab claims parity with OpenAI's Deep Research on agentic search and report-writing tasks, and the weights are available on Hugging Face.

- [X](https://x.com/Ali_TongyiLab/status/1967988004179546451)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/Alibaba-NLP/Tongyi-DeepResearch-30B-A3B)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-open-model-roundup)

### ByteDance / Tsinghua — HuMo (Sep 18, 2025)

ByteDance research and Tsinghua released HuMo, a human-centric video generation model that conditions on multimodal inputs (text, image, and audio) to produce videos of people. The weights are available on Hugging Face.

- [X](https://x.com/altryne/status/1968003981604733359)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/bytedance-research/HuMo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-icpc-and-next-wave-video)

### Luma AI — Ray3 (Sep 18, 2025)

Luma AI launched Ray3, a video generation model it bills as a 'reasoning' video model, with native HDR output, a fast Draft Mode, and Hi-Fi mastering. It is available in Luma's Dream Machine and feeds the episode's closing theme of a next wave of video models.

- [X](https://x.com/LumaLabsAI/status/1968684330034606372)
- [Try It](https://dream-machine.lumalabs.ai/ideas)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-icpc-and-next-wave-video)

### Mistral AI — Magistral-Small-2509 (Sep 18, 2025)

Mistral published Magistral-Small-2509, an updated checkpoint of its small open-weights reasoning model. The refresh keeps Mistral's open reasoning line current as the open-model competitive baseline moves quickly.

- [HF](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Magistral-Small-2509)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-open-model-roundup)

### Moondream — Moondream 3 (Preview) (Sep 18, 2025)

Moondream released a preview of Moondream 3, a 9B mixture-of-experts vision-language model with only 2B active parameters. It targets frontier-level visual reasoning at small-model cost, continuing Moondream's run of efficient open vision models.

- [X](https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1968800178640429496)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/moondream/moondream3-preview)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-open-model-roundup)

### OpenAI — GPT-5-Codex (Sep 18, 2025)

OpenAI released GPT-5-Codex, a version of GPT-5 finetuned for agentic coding inside the Codex product family. It anchors the episode's coding discussion, with the panel focusing on how coding models are becoming trustworthy enough for longer, productized agent workflows rather than just one-shot completions.

- [X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1967636903165038708)
- [OpenAI Blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-upgrades-to-codex/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-gpt5-codex-and-platforms)

### Perceptron AI — Isaac 0.1 (Sep 18, 2025)

Perceptron AI released Isaac 0.1, a 2B parameter perceptive-language model with open weights on Hugging Face. Despite its small size, the show notes highlight that it 'points better than GPT', excelling at visual grounding and pointing tasks relative to much larger models.

- [X](https://x.com/perceptroninc/status/1968365052270150077)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/PerceptronAI/Isaac-0.1)
- [Blog](https://www.perceptron.inc/blog/introducing-isaac-0-1)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-open-model-roundup)

### Reka AI — Reka Speech (Sep 18, 2025)

Reka AI announced Reka Speech, a high-throughput multilingual speech recognition and speech translation model with timestamps, aimed at batch-scale transcription pipelines. It positions Reka in the production ASR market against incumbent transcription APIs.

- [X](https://x.com/RekaAILabs/status/1967989101111722272)
- [Blog](https://reka.ai/news/reka-speech-high-throughput-speech-transcription-and-translation-model-with-timestamps)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025)

### Tencent Hunyuan — Hunyuan 3D 3.0 (Sep 18, 2025)

Tencent released Hunyuan 3D 3.0, the next version of its 3D asset generation model, available to try through a hosted 3D studio. It continues Tencent's rapid cadence of generative 3D releases.

- [X](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1967873084960260470)
- [Try it](https://3d.hunyuan.tencent.com/)
- [3D studio](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1968711532033851657)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025)

### Alibaba (Tongyi Lab) — WebWatcher-32B (Sep 4, 2025)

Alibaba's Tongyi Lab open-sourced WebWatcher, a vision-language deep research agent that sets new state-of-the-art results on agentic browsing and research tasks. The 32B model combines visual understanding with web research capabilities and is available on Hugging Face.

- [X](https://x.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1963018720571462029)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/Alibaba-NLP/WebWatcher-32B)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-codex-return-and-open-source)

### Apple — FastVLM-7B (Sep 4, 2025)

Apple released FastVLM-7B, a vision-language model built around a speed-first vision encoder that delivers up to 85x faster time-to-first-token than peer VLMs. Quantized variants (7B-int4, 1.5B-int8) on Hugging Face make it practical for on-device and real-time vision use, anchoring the show's fast-VLM discussion.

- [X](https://x.com/_akhaliq/status/1962018549674684890)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/apple/FastVLM-7B-int4)
- [HF (1.5B int8)](https://huggingface.co/apple/FastVLM-1.5B-int8)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-codex-vs-cloud-code)

### Google DeepMind — EmbeddingGemma (Sep 4, 2025)

Google released EmbeddingGemma, a 300M-parameter open embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art results for its size, aimed at RAG and on-device semantic search. It dropped as breaking news during the show, with browser-based demos like Semantic Galaxy showing it running fully client-side.

- [X](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/1963635422698856705)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/google/embeddinggemma-300m)
- [Try It](https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/semantic-galaxy)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

### Nous Research — Hermes 4 14B (Sep 4, 2025)

Nous Research launched Hermes 4 at 14B, a compact hybrid reasoning model with tool calling designed for both local and cloud use. It extends the Hermes 4 family down to a size practical for local deployment while keeping reasoning and tool-use capabilities, with a full tech report published on arXiv.

- [X](https://twitter.com/NousResearch/status/1963349882837897535)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-4-14B)
- [Tech Report](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.18255)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-nous-and-husky-bench)

### OpenAI — gpt-realtime (Sep 4, 2025)

OpenAI shipped the gpt-realtime speech-to-speech model and moved the Realtime API to general availability. The GA release adds remote MCP tool support, image input, and SIP phone calling, making it a full production stack for voice agents and tying into the episode's voice-agents discussion with Kwindla Kramer.

- [X](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1961124915719053589)
- [Docs](https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-realtime/#image-input)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

### Swiss AI Initiative — Apertus-8B / Apertus-70B (Sep 4, 2025)

The Swiss AI Initiative launched Apertus-8B and Apertus-70B, fully open multilingual LLMs trained on 15T tokens covering more than 1,800 languages. The release stands out for full openness (weights, data recipe, and training transparency) and unusually broad language coverage from a national effort.

- [X](https://x.com/haeggee/status/1962898537294749960)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/swiss-ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-codex-return-and-open-source)

### Tencent — Hunyuan-MT-7B (Sep 4, 2025)

Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan-MT-7B, a 7B-parameter machine translation model, after it swept the WMT2025 translation competition. It gives the open-weights community a small, focused translation model that punches well above its size class.

- [X](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1962466712378577300)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan-MT-7B)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-codex-return-and-open-source)

### xAI — Grok Code 1 (Sep 4, 2025)

xAI's new Grok Code 1 coding model rocketed to roughly 50% of all coding traffic on OpenRouter shortly after launch, helped by a free promotional period and fast, cheap inference. The panel discussed it as evidence that the coding-model market is highly price- and speed-sensitive.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

## Products & Apps

### Huxe — Huxe (Sep 25, 2025)

Huxe, the personal audio app from former Google NotebookLM team members, just opened up publicly, generating proactive personalized audio briefings. It came up alongside ChatGPT Pulse as another take on proactive, ambient AI products.

- [X](https://x.com/gethuxe/status/1970503800885854431)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-nvidia-openai-and-grok-fast)

### Meta AI — Meta AI Glasses with Display (Sep 18, 2025)

At Meta Connect, Meta unveiled new AI glasses featuring a built-in display, a neural wristband control interface, and a new AI mode. The panel treats the glasses as an interface milestone, arguing the product surface for AI is shifting from apps to display-equipped wearables.

- [X Recap](https://x.com/lukegotbored/status/1968497570008744149)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-meta-glasses-and-multimodal)

### Reve — Reve (Sep 18, 2025)

Reve launched a 4-in-1 AI visual creation platform combining image generation, editing, and related visual workflows in one app. The panel spends real time on it as a serious challenger to Nano Banana and Seedream in the AI image tooling race.

- [X](https://x.com/cantrell/status/1967655268642386361)
- [Reve](https://app.reve.com/)
- [Blog](https://blog.reve.com/posts/the-new-reve/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-meta-glasses-and-multimodal)

### World Labs — Marble (Sep 18, 2025)

World Labs, Fei-Fei Li's spatial intelligence startup, presented Marble, a generative world model that creates explorable 3D environments. The demo is treated on the show as evidence that world models are getting meaningfully closer to usable products.

- [Demo](https://x.com/XRarchitect/status/1968356682888823060)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Pulse (Sep 25, 2025)

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Pulse, a preview feature that proactively researches overnight and delivers personalized daily briefing cards based on your chats, memory, and connected apps, initially for Pro users on mobile. On the show it was discussed as part of OpenAI's push to build a durable product moat as raw model access commoditizes.

- [OpenAI Blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-pulse/)
- [X](https://x.com/OpenAI)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-nvidia-openai-and-grok-fast)

### Google — Gemini in Chrome (Sep 18, 2025)

Google shipped Gemini directly into Chrome, adding an AI assistant that works across tabs, a smarter omnibox, and safer-browsing features. It moves the browser itself into the AI interface race, putting an assistant in front of Chrome's massive user base.

- [Blog](https://blog.google/products/chrome/chrome-reimagined-with-ai/)
- [Blog (AI features)](https://blog.google/products/chrome/new-ai-features-for-chrome/)
- [X](https://x.com/search?q=gemini%20chrome&src=typed_query)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT thinking budgets (Sep 18, 2025)

OpenAI rolled out thinking budgets in the ChatGPT app, letting users control how much reasoning effort the model spends on a request. It is a small but notable product lever for tuning the cost-versus-quality tradeoff of reasoning models.

- [X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1968395215536042241)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-gpt5-codex-and-platforms)

### Weights & Biases — Weave in W&B Workspaces (Sep 18, 2025)

Weights & Biases shipped Weave inside W&B Models workspaces, so reinforcement learning runs can now be logged and inspected with Weave trace tooling alongside training metrics. The show frames it as giving RL training 'x-ray vision' into what the model is actually doing.

- [X](https://x.com/shawnup/status/1968403633764266189)
- [W&B Docs](https://weave-docs.wandb.ai/guides/tools/weave-in-workspaces)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025)

### Mistral AI — Le Chat Connectors & Memories (Sep 4, 2025)

Mistral upgraded Le Chat with more than 20 MCP-powered connectors and controllable Memories targeted at enterprise workflows. The update positions Le Chat as a serious enterprise assistant by wiring it into existing tools via the Model Context Protocol while giving users explicit control over what the assistant remembers.

- [X](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1962881086440038545)
- [Blog](https://mistral.ai/news/le-chat-mcp-connectors-memories)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Projects for Free Users (Sep 4, 2025)

OpenAI rolled out Projects to free ChatGPT users, adding larger file uploads and project-only memory controls. The change brings organized, memory-scoped workspaces to the free tier rather than keeping them behind paid plans.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

## Papers & Research

### Jeremy Berman & Eric Pang — ARC-AGI SOTA method (Sep 18, 2025)

Independent researchers Jeremy Berman and Eric Pang published a new state-of-the-art result on ARC-AGI, built on Grok-4 with heavy test-time compute and iterative program synthesis. Berman joins the show to walk through the method, its limitations, and why iteration matters more than leaderboard narratives; the approach is documented in a detailed write-up.

- [X](https://x.com/arcprize/status/1967998885701538060)
- [Blog](https://jeremyberman.substack.com/p/how-i-got-the-highest-score-on-arc-agi-again)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-jeremy-berman-on-arc-agi)

### OpenAI & NBER — How People Use ChatGPT (Sep 18, 2025)

OpenAI and NBER published a working paper analyzing ChatGPT usage growth, demographics, and scale. The study gives the first rigorous public look at how the consumer ChatGPT user base actually behaves, feeding the episode's closing discussion of usage stats and momentum.

- [X](https://twitter.com/rohanpaul_ai/status/1967769809929822659)
- [Blog](https://forklightning.substack.com/p/how-people-use-chatgpt)
- [NBER Paper](https://www.nber.org/papers/w34255)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-icpc-and-next-wave-video)

### Tencent Hunyuan — Hunyuan SRPO (Sep 18, 2025)

Tencent Hunyuan published SRPO (Semantic Relative Preference Optimization), a post-training technique that significantly improves the output quality of diffusion image models. The team released weights on Hugging Face along with a project page and striking before/after comparisons.

- [X](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1967853314915315945)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/tencent/SRPO)
- [Project](https://tencent.github.io/srpo-project-page/)
- [Comparison X](https://x.com/hellorob/status/1967667203593183343/photo/2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 18 - Gpt-5-Codex, OAI wins ICPC, Reve, ARC-AGI SOTA Interview, Meta AI Glasses & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-18-2025#sec-open-model-roundup)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Meta AI & Hugging Face — Gaia2 + ARE (Sep 25, 2025)

Meta and Hugging Face released Gaia2, a follow-up agent benchmark, together with ARE (Agents Research Environments) for testing agents in dynamic, asynchronous settings. It fed the episode's recurring concern that evaluation has to keep up whenever agent product claims get ambitious.

- [X](https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/1970885829552705976)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/blog/gaia2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-agents-robotics-and-gdp-eval)

### OpenAI — GDPval (Sep 25, 2025)

OpenAI introduced GDPval, an evaluation that measures model performance on real-world, economically valuable tasks drawn from a range of occupations and GDP sectors. On the show it anchored the discussion about agents moving from chat quality toward action and reliability in real environments.

- [X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1971249374077518226)
- [Blog](https://openai.com/index/gdpval/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-agents-robotics-and-gdp-eval)

### Scale AI — SWE-bench Pro (Sep 25, 2025)

Scale AI released SWE-bench Pro, a tougher, contamination-resistant successor to SWE-bench for evaluating coding agents on realistic software engineering tasks. It ships with a public dataset on Hugging Face plus separate public and commercial leaderboards, and frontier models score far lower than on the original SWE-bench.

- [HF Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/ScaleAI/SWE-bench_Pro)
- [Public Leaderboard](https://scale.com/leaderboard/swe_bench_pro_public)
- [Commercial Leaderboard](https://scale.com/leaderboard/swe_bench_pro_commercial)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-agents-robotics-and-gdp-eval)

### Nous Research — Husky Hold'em Bench (Sep 4, 2025)

Nous Research released Husky Hold'em Bench, an open-source poker benchmark that evaluates LLM strategic play in a richer agentic environment than standard leaderboards. Guests Roger Jin and Bhavesh Kumar joined the show to explain how it measures agent behavior and decision-making under uncertainty rather than chasing another leaderboard point.

- [X](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/1963371292318749043)
- [Bench](https://huskybench.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-nous-and-husky-bench)

## Funding

### NVIDIA — NVIDIA-OpenAI $100B partnership (Sep 25, 2025)

Nvidia and OpenAI announced a letter of intent under which Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the two deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for OpenAI's next-generation infrastructure. The episode's big-company segment centered on this deal as evidence that money and infrastructure, not just models, now drive the AI race.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Qwen‑mas Strikes Again: VL/Omni Blitz + Grok‑4 Fast + Nvidia’s $100B Bet](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-25-2025#sec-nvidia-openai-and-grok-fast)

### Anthropic — Series F Funding (Sep 4, 2025)

Anthropic closed a $13B Series F round at a $183B post-money valuation, one of the largest private AI raises to date. The panel treated the round as part of a wider story where capital and capability are accelerating together at the frontier labs.

- [X](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1962909475594985935)
- [Blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-series-f-at-usd183b-post-money-valuation)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

### OpenAI — $10B Fundraise / Employee Buyback (Sep 4, 2025)

OpenAI was reported to be raising around $10B at a roughly $500B valuation, structured in part as a share buyback for employees. Together with Anthropic's Series F, it underscored the episode's theme that frontier-lab funding has reached unprecedented scale.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

## Acquisitions

### CoreWeave — OpenPipe Acquisition (Sep 4, 2025)

CoreWeave acquired OpenPipe, the fine-tuning and reinforcement-learning platform behind the ART trainer. Covered in the This Week's Buzz segment, the deal brings OpenPipe's model-customization tooling under the same roof as CoreWeave's GPU cloud and Weights & Biases.

- [Blog](https://openpipe.ai/blog/openpipe-coreweave)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

### OpenAI — Statsig & Alex Acquisition (Sep 4, 2025)

OpenAI acquired experimentation platform Statsig and the Alex coding tool for a combined $1.1B+, a move aimed at strengthening its applications team. Statsig's founder reportedly takes on a senior product role as OpenAI invests in shipping consumer and developer products faster.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Sep 4 - Codex Rises, Anthropic Raises $13B, Nous plays poker, Apple speeds up VLMs & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/sep-04-2025#sec-frontier-news-and-funding)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in September 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-09), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-09 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in July 2025

> 14 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-07


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Agentica — DeepSWE-Preview (Jul 3, 2025)

Agentica and collaborators (with guest Michael Luo of UC Berkeley) released DeepSWE-Preview, a fully open-sourced RL-trained coding agent built on Qwen3-32B that reached 59% on SWE-Bench Verified, a top open result in a benchmark dominated by closed systems. The team published training methodology and weights, emphasizing reproducible reward design and verification over sealed benchmark numbers.

**59%** SWE-Bench Verified

- [Training write-up (Notion)](https://pretty-radio-b75.notion.site/DeepSWE-Training-a-Fully-Open-sourced-State-of-the-Art-Coding-Agent-by-Scaling-RL-22281902c1468193aabbe9a8c59bbe33)
- [Hugging Face model](https://huggingface.co/Agentica/DeepSWE-Preview)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-introducing-deepsuite)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen-TTS (Jul 3, 2025)

The Qwen team released Qwen-TTS, a bilingual Chinese/English text-to-speech model claiming human-level naturalness, available via API with a Hugging Face demo space. It was the second voice release of the week alongside Kyutai TTS.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1939553252166836457)
- [Hugging Face demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen-TTS)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-closing-remarks-and-tts)

### Baidu — ERNIE 4.5 (Jul 3, 2025)

Baidu open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 series, a family of 10 models ranging from 424B down to 0.3B parameters with multimodal capabilities, reportedly beating o1 on DocVQA. The release marks a sharp reversal from Baidu's previous anti-open-source posture and another sign that Chinese labs are setting the pace in open source.

**10** ERNIE 4.5 models

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Baidu_Inc/status/1939724778157511126)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/baidu)
- [Technical report (PDF)](https://ernie.baidu.com/blog/publication/ERNIE_Technical_Report.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-baidu-ernie-45)

### Chai Discovery — Chai-2 (Jul 3, 2025)

Chai Discovery introduced Chai-2, a model for zero-shot antibody design that generates candidate antibodies without iterative lab screening. Mentioned in the show notes tools section as one of the week's notable science releases.

- [Introducing Chai-2](https://www.chaidiscovery.com/news/introducing-chai-2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025)

### Huawei — Pangu Pro MoE (Jul 3, 2025)

Huawei released Pangu Pro, a 72B-parameter MoE trained on its own Ascend NPUs rather than Nvidia or AMD hardware, hitting 1,528 tokens/sec and pretrained on 13T tokens. The panel framed it as the geopolitical open-model story of the week, showing how far Chinese compute stacks have advanced under sanctions.

- [X coverage](https://x.com/search?q=pangu%20pro&src=typed_query)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/IntervitensInc/pangu-pro-moe-model)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-huawei-pangu-pro)

### Kyutai — Kyutai TTS (Jul 3, 2025)

Kyutai Labs released an open 1.6B-parameter text-to-speech model with low latency and high voice similarity in English and French. It was one of two TTS launches closing out the episode, underscoring how quickly multimodal product quality is rising.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/kyutai_labs/status/1940767331921416302)
- [Hugging Face model](https://huggingface.co/kyutai/tts-1.6b-en_fr)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-closing-remarks-and-tts)

### OpenRouter — Cypher Alpha (Jul 3, 2025)

A stealth model called Cypher Alpha showed up on OpenRouter with a free 1M-token context window, with the panel speculating it could be Amazon Titan. Alex used it as an example of how model releases increasingly arrive as anonymous market probes rather than tidy launches.

- [OpenRouter listing](https://openrouter.ai/openrouter/cypher-alpha:free/providers)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-new-ai-models-and-openrouter)

### Tencent — Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct (Jul 3, 2025)

Tencent released Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct, an 80B-parameter MoE that activates only 13B parameters at inference while keeping a 256K context window. Built by the team with WizardLM lineage, it posts strong reasoning benchmarks and feels unusually practical for its class, though the panel flagged its license limits.

**13B** Hunyuan active params

- [X announcement](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1938525874904801490)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan-A13B-Instruct)
- [Try it](https://hunyuan.tencent.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-tencent-hunyuan-a13b)

## Products & Apps

### Dynamics Lab — Mirage (Jul 3, 2025)

Dynamics Lab unveiled Mirage, billed as the world's first AI-native user-generated-content game engine, with real-time photorealistic playable demos powered by world-model-style generation. Alex reacted to it live as the most visibly fun demo of the week and a preview of where interactive media is headed.

- [Playable demo & blog](https://blog.dynamicslab.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-mirage-ai-generated-games)

## Major Features & Updates

### Cloudflare — One-Click AI Bot Blocking (Jul 3, 2025)

Cloudflare announced a one-click feature letting site owners block AI scraping bots, a direct response to the economics of perpetual web scraping by AI labs. The move puts a default-off switch in front of a large share of the internet and highlights the tension between open research norms and commercial scraping.

- [Cloudflare announcement on X](https://x.com/Cloudflare/status/1939988601976021156)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-cloudflare-ai-bot-blocking)

### Cursor (Anysphere) — Cursor Agents on Web, Mobile & Slack (Jul 3, 2025)

Cursor launched its AI coding agents on web and mobile with Slack integration, extending code agents beyond the editor window into ambient, always-on workflow software. The launch landed the same week Cursor poached key creators of Claude Code, making it product-strategy news as much as HR news.

- [Cursor Agents](https://cursor.com/agents)
- [Hugging Face space](https://huggingface.co/spaces/cursor)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-cursor-latest-developments)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.5 Pro (free tier) (Jul 3, 2025)

Google brought Gemini 2.5 Pro back to its free tier, making its flagship reasoning model available again to consumer users at no cost. A quick-hit item in the big-company segment of the show.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025)

## Papers & Research

### Microsoft — MAI-DxO (Jul 3, 2025)

Microsoft AI published MAI-DxO, a medical diagnostic orchestration system that reached 85.5% accuracy on challenging NEJM-style cases compared to roughly 20% for practicing physicians. The result is framed as a systems win rather than a single-model win, suggesting orchestration may outperform individual models in high-stakes expert workflows.

**85.5%** MAI-DxO accuracy

- [Mustafa Suleyman on X](https://x.com/mustafasuleyman/status/1939670330332868696)
- [Microsoft AI blog](https://microsoft.ai/new/the-path-to-medical-superintelligence/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-microsoft-medical-ai-breakthrough)

## Also Released

### Meta — Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) (Jul 3, 2025)

Zuckerberg formally assembled Meta Superintelligence Labs, recruiting a dream team of researchers from OpenAI and other labs with rumored compensation packages of up to $300M. The panel treated the spree as proof that the AI talent war has entered full wartime economics, debating whether money alone can buy research momentum.

**$300M** Rumored Meta packages

- [MSL hires tracker (spreadsheet)](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qX7_VK8vN2v2urpiBY_we-FNz2PS3ZKsWp_9kXCyQB0/edit?usp=sharing)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jul 3 - ERNIE 4.5, Hunyuan A13B, MAI-DxO outperforms doctors, RL beats SWE bench, Zuck MSL hiring spree & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jul-03-2025#sec-meta-bold-moves)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in July 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-07), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-07 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in May 2025

> 43 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-05


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Black Forest Labs — FLUX.1 Kontext (May 29, 2025)

Black Forest Labs, creators of Flux, released Kontext: three models (Pro, Max, and a 12B open-weights Dev in private preview) for consistent, context-aware text and image editing. Unlike GPT-image or VEO-style regeneration, Kontext keeps identity consistent across edits, adding what you ask for without changing your face every generation. Broke as news during the show.

- [Tweet](https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/1928143010811748863)
- [Announcement](https://bfl.ai/announcements/flux-1-kontext)
- [Flux Playground](https://playground.bfl.ai/image/generate)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-black-forest-labs-drops-flux-kontext-sota-image-editing)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek-R1-0528 (May 29, 2025)

DeepSeek released R1-0528 out of nowhere, an update to their open-weights reasoning model with serious performance jumps: AIME 91, LiveCodeBench 73, and SWE-bench Verified 57.6. They also shipped an 8B distilled version based on Qwen3 that can run on a laptop, keeping it among the best open-weight models available.

**91** AIME score, beating previous R1 by a mile · **8B** Distilled Qwen3-based version runnable on a laptop

- [Try It](https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1927828675837513793)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-open-source-ai-llms-deepseek-whales-mind-bending-papers)

### Haize Labs — j1-nano & j1-micro (May 29, 2025)

Haize Labs shipped j1-nano (600M params) and j1-micro (1.7B params), tiny open reward models for judging LLM outputs. Despite their small size, j1-micro scores 80.7% on RewardBench, making capable reward modeling accessible on modest hardware.

- [Tweet](https://x.com/leonardtang_/status/1927396709870489634)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/haizelabs/j1-micro)
- [HF j1-micro](https://huggingface.co/haizelabs/j1-micro)
- [HF j1-nano](https://huggingface.co/haizelabs/j1-nano)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-open-source-ai-llms-deepseek-whales-mind-bending-papers)

### Resemble AI — Chatterbox (May 29, 2025)

Resemble AI released Chatterbox, an open-source voice cloning model with emotion control. Weights and code are public on GitHub and Hugging Face, bringing controllable, expressive voice cloning to the open ecosystem.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/resemble-ai/chatterbox)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-voice-audio-everyone-gets-a-voice)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — HunyuanPortrait (May 29, 2025)

Tencent's Hunyuan team published HunyuanPortrait, a model for high-fidelity portrait video generation from a single photo. It animates a still portrait into realistic talking-head video, with an accompanying paper.

- [Site](https://kkakkkka.github.io/HunyuanPortrait/)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18860)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-vision-video-reality-is-optional-now)

### Tencent (Hunyuan) — HunyuanVideo-Avatar (May 29, 2025)

Tencent Hunyuan released HunyuanVideo-Avatar, an audio-driven full-body avatar animation model. Feed it audio and a reference image and it animates a full-body avatar in sync, pushing AI-generated humans further toward indistinguishable.

- [Site](https://hunyuanvideo-avatar.github.io/)
- [Tweet](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1927575170710974560)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-vision-video-reality-is-optional-now)

### A-M Team — AM-Thinking v1 (May 15, 2025)

A 32B dense open-weights reasoning LLM from a new Chinese team that takes on much larger mixture-of-experts models and comes out on top for math and code, hitting 85.3% on AIME 2024, 70.3% on LiveCodeBench v5, and 92.5% on Arena-Hard. It supports a /think reasoning toggle, ships with a permissive license, is tooled for vLLM, LM Studio, and Ollama, and runs at 25 tokens/sec on a single 80GB GPU with INT4 quantization. A multilingual RLHF pass and 128k context window are in the works.

**32B** dense parameters · **85.3%** AIME 2024 · **25** tokens/sec on a single 80GB GPU with INT4 · **128** k context window planned

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/a-m-team/AM-Thinking-v1)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08311)
- [Project page](https://a-m-team.github.io/am-thinking-v1/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-open-source-llms-the-decentralization-tsunami)

### Alibaba — Wan 2.1 (May 15, 2025)

Alibaba, the team behind the Qwen LLMs, released Wan 2.1, a full stack of open-source diffusion-transformer text-to-video foundation models. Amid the show's discussion of video-model fatigue, this was called out as a release that cuts through the noise, with weights on Hugging Face and code on GitHub.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/Wan-Video/Wan2.1)
- [Announcement tweet](https://x.com/Alibaba_Wan/status/1922655324919779604)
- [Try it](https://wan.video/wanxiang/videoCreation)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-vision-video-open-source-shines-through-the-noise)

### ByteDance — Seed1.5-VL (May 15, 2025)

ByteDance's Seed team published the technical report for Seed1.5-VL, a 20B-parameter vision-language model with thinking capabilities. It was covered among the big-company releases of the week, with the tech report shared on GitHub.

- [Technical report](https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Seed1.5-VL/blob/main/Seed1.5-VL-Technical-Report.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-big-company-llms-apis-models-modes-and-model-zoo-confusion)

### Lightricks — LTX Video (distilled) (May 15, 2025)

Lightricks shared a distilled version of its LTX video model that generates video at near real-time speeds. It was highlighted in the vision and video segment as a notable speed milestone for video generation.

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/yoavhacohen/status/1922674340081897977)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-vision-video-open-source-shines-through-the-noise)

### Stability AI — Stable Audio Open Small (May 15, 2025)

Stability AI, together with Arm, released Stable Audio Open Small, a 341M-parameter open text-to-audio model built for real-world on-device deployment. The show framed it as part of a small comeback for Stability, with weights on Hugging Face and an accompanying paper.

- [Blog](https://stability.ai/news/stability-ai-and-arm-release-stable-audio-open-small-enabling-real-world-deployment-for-on-device-audio-control)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08175)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-audio-open-small)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/jordiponsdotme/status/1922680538197881055)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025)

### StepFun — Step1X-3D (May 15, 2025)

StepFun released Step1X-3D, an open two-stage framework for high-fidelity, controllable generation of textured 3D assets: it first synthesizes watertight geometry, then generates view-consistent textures. Trained on 2M curated meshes, the release also includes a curated dataset of 800K assets and a Hugging Face demo.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/Step1X-3D)
- [Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/stepfun-ai/Step1X-3D)
- [Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/stepfun-ai/Step1X-3D-obj-data/tree/main)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-stepfun-step1x-3d-high-fidelity-3d-asset-generation)

### Technology Innovation Institute (TII) — Falcon-Edge (May 15, 2025)

TII's Falcon-Edge project releases ternary BitNet LLMs (1B and 3B base models) that slash memory and compute requirements, enabling inference on less than 1GB of VRAM. Fine-tuners get pre-quantized checkpoints and a clear path to 1-bit LLMs.

- [Blog](https://falcon-lm.github.io/blog/falcon-edge/)
- [Falcon-E-1B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/Falcon-E-1B-Base)
- [Falcon-E-3B on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tiiuae/Falcon-E-3B-Base)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-other-open-source-standouts)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 2.5 Omni (May 1, 2025)

Alongside the Qwen 3 launch, Alibaba updated its Qwen 2.5 Omni multimodal model line. Mentioned briefly in the open-source roundup as part of the week's Qwen ecosystem push.

- [Alibaba Qwen announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1917585963775320086)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-other-open-source-updates)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen 3 (May 1, 2025)

Alibaba released the entire Qwen 3 stack: two MoE models (235B total/22B active and 30B/3B active) plus six dense siblings from 32B down to 0.6B, all Apache 2.0 with day-one support in LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM, MLX and llama.cpp. The headline feature is a runtime hybrid 'thinking' toggle (/think and /no_think) that trades latency for reasoning depth. Trained on ~36T tokens with 128K context and 119-language coverage, the 235B MoE rivals DeepSeek-R1, o1, o3-mini and Gemini 2.5 Pro on coding and math.

**235 B** Flagship MoE total parameters (22B active) · **30 B** Qwen3-30B-A3B hit 57 tok/s on a Mac with speculative decoding · **36** Trillions of pre-training tokens (2x Qwen 2.5) · **235B** MoE rivals DeepSeek-R1, o1, o3-mini and Gemini 2.5 Pro

- [Qwen 3 blog post](https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen3/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen3-67dd247413f0e2e4f653967f)
- [HF demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/Qwen3-Demo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-qwen-3-hybrid-thinking-on-tap)

### HiDream — HiDream E1 (May 1, 2025)

HiDream released E1, an open-weights image editing/generation model (Apache 2.0-style licensing) noted for beautiful Ghibli-style outputs. It ranks #4 on the Artificial Analysis image arena leaderboard, sitting among top contenders like Google Imagen and ReCraft.

- [Hugging Face: HiDream-E1-Full](https://huggingface.co/HiDream-ai/HiDream-E1-Full/blob/main/demo.jpg)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-hidream-e1-open-source-ghibli-style)

### JetBrains — Mellum-4b-base (May 1, 2025)

JetBrains published Mellum-4b-base on Hugging Face, a 4B-parameter model specialized for code completion that powers its IDE AI features. Listed in the episode's open-source links roundup.

- [Hugging Face: Mellum-4b-base](https://huggingface.co/JetBrains/Mellum-4b-base)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-other-open-source-updates)

### Kyutai — Helium-1 (May 1, 2025)

Kyutai released Helium-1, a 2B-parameter model distilled from Gemma-2-9B and purpose-built for Europe's 24 official languages, under CC-BY 4.0. It sets a new state of the art for its size class on MMLU-EU, ARC-EU and FLORES translation while fitting in under 2GB VRAM for edge and phone deployment. They also open-sourced 'dactory' (MIT), their full Common Crawl data-processing pipeline that scores, dedups and tags webpages.

- [Blog post](https://kyutai.org/2025/04/30/helium.html)
- [Hugging Face: helium-1-2b](https://huggingface.co/kyutai/helium-1-2b)
- [Dactory pipeline (GitHub)](https://github.com/kyutai/dactory)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-other-open-source-updates)

### Meta AI — Llama Guard 4 (May 1, 2025)

Meta's LlamaCon security drop included Llama Guard 4 (text + image protection), Llama Firewall (stops prompt hacks and risky code), Prompt Guard 2 (faster jailbreak defense), CyberSecEval 4, and a new Defender Program for security researchers.

- [AI at Meta LlamaCon announcements (X)](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1917271400118902860)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-google-updates-llamacon-recap)

### Microsoft — Phi-4-reasoning (May 1, 2025)

Microsoft fine-tuned the 14B Phi-4 on 1.4M curated chain-of-thought traces (SFT) and added a small RL stage (Plus variant) to create two MIT-licensed reasoning models. They punch far above their weight: Phi-4-reasoning-plus outperforms DeepSeek-R1-Distill-70B on AIME 25 (78% vs 51%) and sits within a few points of the full 671B DeepSeek-R1, while running on a single GPU with explicit <think> scaffolding.

- [ArXiv paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21318)
- [Tech report](https://aka.ms/phi-reasoning/techreport)
- [Hugging Face: Phi-4-reasoning](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/Phi-4-reasoning)
- [Suriya's thread](https://x.com/suriyagnskr/status/1917731754515013772)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-other-open-source-updates)

### OpenPipe — ART·E (May 1, 2025)

OpenPipe released ART·E, an Apache 2.0 email research agent built on a 14B Qwen 2.5 backbone, trained on 500K Enron emails plus synthetic Q&A and refined with reinforcement learning. It tops o3 on accuracy (96% vs 90%) while running 5x faster (1.1s median) and 64x cheaper ($0.85 per 1,000 queries), using a simple three-tool loop.

- [Launch thread (X)](https://x.com/corbtt/status/1917269992363680054)
- [Blog post](https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent)
- [GitHub: OpenPipe/ART](https://github.com/OpenPipe/ART)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025)

### Xiaomi — MiMo-7B (May 1, 2025)

Xiaomi's first open-weights release is a 7B dense family (Base, SFT, RL, RL-Zero) trained from scratch on 25T tokens with a multi-token-prediction objective and rule-verifiable reinforcement learning. The RL variant matches OpenAI o1-mini on benchmark suites despite being far smaller, scoring 55.4% on AIME 2025 and 49.3% on LiveCodeBench v6, all under an MIT license with vLLM-ready weights.

- [Hugging Face model hub](https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-other-open-source-updates)

## Products & Apps

### Kyutai — Unmute.sh (May 29, 2025)

Kyutai (the lab behind Moshi) launched Unmute.sh, a modular wrapper that adds voice to any text LLM with under 300ms latency and semantic VAD that knows a thinking pause from a breath. It preserves the underlying text model's capabilities while adding natural voice interaction, and is slated to be open-sourced.

- [Try It](http://unmute.sh/)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/kyutai_labs/status/1925840420187025892)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-voice-audio-everyone-gets-a-voice)

### Odyssey — Odyssey Interactive Video (May 29, 2025)

Odyssey launched interactive video: real-time AI world exploration rendered at 30 FPS, letting you walk through generated worlds as they are created. A glimpse at world-model-driven media where the video responds to you instead of just playing back.

- [Blog](https://odyssey.world/introducing-interactive-video)
- [Try It](https://experience.odyssey.world/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-vision-video-reality-is-optional-now)

### Opera — Opera Neon (May 29, 2025)

Opera announced Neon, an agent-centric AI browser built for autonomous web tasks. Instead of just assisting with browsing, it is designed to act on the web for you, joining the emerging category of agentic browsers.

- [Site](https://www.operaneon.com/)
- [Tweet](https://x.com/opera/status/1927645192254861746)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025)

### Google DeepMind — AlphaEvolve (May 15, 2025)

Google DeepMind announced AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered coding agent that designs and evolves advanced algorithms, credited on the show as one of the week's mind-bending algorithmic-discovery stories. DeepMind opened an interest form for early access rather than shipping it broadly.

- [Blog](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-coding-agent-for-designing-advanced-algorithms/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-big-company-llms-apis-models-modes-and-model-zoo-confusion)

### Nous Research — Psyche (May 15, 2025)

Psyche is Nous Research's decentralized cooperative-training network that lets distributed participants jointly train large models over the internet. The launch includes open code on GitHub and a live dashboard tracking the first run, a 40B model called Consilience. COO Dillon Rolnick joined the show to explain the decentralized training push.

- [Website](https://nousresearch.com/nous-psyche/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/NousResearch/psyche)
- [Announcement tweet](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/1922744494002405444)
- [Consilience 40B dashboard](https://psyche.network/runs/consilience-40b-1/0)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-open-source-llms-the-decentralization-tsunami)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Claude Voice Mode (May 29, 2025)

Anthropic shipped a voice mode on mobile, bringing conversational voice AI to the Claude apps. Another entry in the week's theme of every major lab giving its models a voice.

- [Anthropic X announcement](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1927463559836877214)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-voice-audio-everyone-gets-a-voice)

### OpenAI — Advanced Voice Mode (May 29, 2025)

OpenAI updated ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode with new capabilities, including the ability to sing. Part of a week where voice interfaces kept converging on more natural, expressive interaction.

- [X demo](https://x.com/nicdunz/status/1927107805032399032)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-voice-audio-everyone-gets-a-voice)

### OpenAI — GPT-4.1 in ChatGPT (May 15, 2025)

OpenAI's GPT-4.1 series, previously available only via the API, is now selectable in the ChatGPT interface. The crew used the news to dig into model-picker UX: seven model options in the dropdown, each with its own quirks, speed, and context length, while most casual users don't even know the dropdown exists.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-big-company-llms-apis-models-modes-and-model-zoo-confusion)

### Anthropic — Claude Integrations (MCP) (May 1, 2025)

Breaking during the show: Anthropic announced Integrations, letting Claude connect directly to apps like Asana, Intercom, Linear, Zapier, Stripe, Atlassian, Cloudflare and PayPal via MCP. Developers can build their own integrations quickly, bringing tool use to Claude.ai itself rather than just the API.

- [Anthropic announcement (X)](https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1918040744920334705)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-breaking-news-claude-ai-will-support-tools-via-mcp)

### Google — NotebookLM Audio Overviews (May 1, 2025)

Google expanded NotebookLM's AI audio overviews (the podcast-style summaries) to support more than 50 languages, taking the feature global beyond its English-only debut.

- [Google announcement (X)](https://x.com/Google/status/1917315769299357712)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-google-updates-llamacon-recap)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Shopping (May 1, 2025)

OpenAI rolled out shopping features in ChatGPT, letting the assistant find and recommend products for users. Mentioned briefly in the big-companies roundup amid the week's OpenAI sycophancy drama.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-big-companies-apis-drama-departures-and-deployments)

### Runway — Gen-4 References (May 1, 2025)

Runway launched References for Gen-4 on all paid plans, letting creators supply reference images (characters, outfits, locations, even selfies) and use tags in prompts to keep those elements consistent across generations. It tackles AI video's biggest pain point, frame-to-frame identity drift, at no extra credit cost per run.

- [Runway References examples (X search)](https://x.com/search?q=runway%20References)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-runway-references-consistency-unlocked)

## APIs & Platforms

### Mistral AI — Mistral Agents API (May 29, 2025)

Mistral released an Agents API, a framework for building custom tool-using agents on top of Mistral models. It joins the wave of big-lab agent frameworks, letting developers wire up tools and orchestrate agentic workflows through Mistral's platform.

- [Blog](https://mistral.ai/news/agents-api)
- [Tweet](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1927364741162307702)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025)

### Mistral AI — Mistral Embed (May 29, 2025)

Mistral announced a new state-of-the-art embedding API. The release gives developers a SOTA option for retrieval and semantic search workloads served through Mistral's platform.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/MistralAI/status/1927732682756112398)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025)

### Anthropic — Web Search API (May 15, 2025)

Anthropic released a Web Search API that gives Claude models real-time web retrieval, letting developers ground responses in current information directly through the API. It was covered among the week's big-company API updates.

- [Blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/web-search-api)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025#sec-big-company-llms-apis-models-modes-and-model-zoo-confusion)

### Meta AI — Llama API (May 1, 2025)

At LlamaCon, Meta unveiled an official Llama API for developers, with fast inference powered by Groq hardware. Zuckerberg also confirmed Llama thinking models are coming, along with a new meta.ai app with a social feed and a full-duplex voice model in the works.

- [AI at Meta LlamaCon announcements (X)](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1917271400118902860)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-google-updates-llamacon-recap)

## Papers & Research

### UC Berkeley — Intuitor (Learning to Reason Without External Rewards) (May 29, 2025)

A mind-bending paper showing that reinforcement learning with internal or even random rewards can improve reasoning models. Intuitor matched or exceeded some GRPO results (the external-reward framework DeepSeek popularized with R1) when finetuning Qwen2.5 3B, questioning how much of RL's gains come from the reward signal itself.

**3B** Qwen2.5 model size where Intuitor matched or exceeded GRPO results

- [X announcement](https://x.com/xuandongzhao/status/1927270931874910259)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-29-2025#sec-open-source-ai-llms-deepseek-whales-mind-bending-papers)

### MiniMax (Hailuo) — MiniMax Speech (May 15, 2025)

MiniMax (Hailuo) published the technical report for MiniMax Speech, its text-to-speech system, which the show described as the best TTS out there. The report details the architecture behind the system on arXiv.

- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07916)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025)

### Cohere — The Leaderboard Illusion (May 1, 2025)

Cohere Labs published 'The Leaderboard Illusion,' claiming LMArena lets big incumbents privately A/B-test dozens of model variants (Meta ran 27 hidden Llama-4 variants in a month), cherry-pick top scores, and receive far more battle data, inflating Elo ratings. LMArena responded that the leaderboard reflects real human preferences and pre-release testing is open to all providers.

- [Paper (ArXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20879)
- [LMArena reply (X)](https://x.com/lmarena_ai/status/1917492084359192890)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-big-companies-apis-drama-departures-and-deployments)

## Datasets

### UC Berkeley — PromptEvals (May 1, 2025)

Shreya Shankar and collaborators released PromptEvals, the first large-scale corpus of production LLM guardrails: 2,087 developer prompts paired with 12,623 assertion criteria covering structure, style, grounding and hallucination checks, about 5x larger than prior sets. Fine-tuned open Mistral-7B and Llama-3-8B checkpoints generate assertions +21 F1 better than GPT-4o at a fraction of the latency. Accepted to NAACL 2025.

- [NAACL paper (ArXiv)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.14738)
- [Dataset (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/datasets/reyavir/PromptEvals)
- [Models (Hugging Face)](https://huggingface.co/reyavir)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 1- Qwen 3, Phi-4, OpenAI glazegate, RIP GPT4, LlamaCon, LMArena in hot water & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-01-2025#sec-evals-deep-dive-with-hamel-husain-shreya-shankar)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### OpenAI — HealthBench (May 15, 2025)

OpenAI released HealthBench, a benchmark for evaluating AI models on healthcare scenarios, built with input from physicians. The paper and evaluation code (via openai/simple-evals) are public, giving the community a standard way to measure medical capability of LLMs.

- [Blog](https://openai.com/index/healthbench/)
- [Paper](https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/bd7a39d5-9e9f-47b3-903c-8b847ca650c7/healthbench_paper.pdf)
- [Code (simple-evals)](https://github.com/openai/simple-evals)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - May 15 - Genocidal Grok, ChatGPT 4.1, AM-Thinking, Distributed LLM training & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/may-15-2025)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in May 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-05), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-05 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in April 2025

> 64 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-04


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Daily (Pipecat) — Smart-Turn VAD (Apr 24, 2025)

The Pipecat team (from Daily) released Smart-Turn, an open source semantic voice activity detection model that understands when a speaker has actually finished their turn rather than just detecting silence. Kwindla Kramer joined the show to break down how semantic VAD makes voice agent conversations feel far more natural, with a community training effort at turn-training.pipecat.ai.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/pipecat-ai/smart-turn)
- [HF Model](https://huggingface.co/pipecat-ai/smart-turn)
- [Fal.ai Playground](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/smart-turn/playground)
- [Try It Demo](https://pcc-smart-turn.vercel.app/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-voice-and-audio-innovations-emotional-tts-and-smarter-conversations)

### Google DeepMind — Gemma 3 QAT (Apr 24, 2025)

Google released Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) versions of the Gemma 3 family, dramatically cutting memory requirements while preserving quality. The 27B model drops from a hefty 54GB to just 14.1GB, and even the 1B model goes from 2GB to about half a gig, making state-of-the-art open models runnable on consumer GPUs. Wolfram took the 4B QAT model for a spin in LM Studio on the show.

**27B** Gemma 3 27B QAT: 54GB down to 14.1GB · **1B** Gemma 3 1B QAT: 2GB down to ~0.5GB · **4B** 4B QAT model tested in LM Studio

- [X Post](https://x.com/osanseviero/status/1913220285328748832)
- [Blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/gemma-3-quantized-aware-trained-state-of-the-art-ai-to-consumer-gpus/)
- [Reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https://i.redd.it/23ut7jd3klve1.jpeg)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights-community-vision-and-efficiency)

### Lvmin Zhang (lllyasviel) — FramePack (Apr 24, 2025)

FramePack, from ControlNet creator Lvmin Zhang (lllyasviel), is an open source next-frame prediction approach for long video generation that runs on consumer hardware. It can generate videos up to 120 seconds long on as little as 6GB of VRAM by packing input frame context into a fixed length.

**120s** Max video length · **6GB** Minimum VRAM

- [Project Page](https://framepack.github.io/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/lllyasviel/FramePack)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-vision-and-video-send-ai-s-surprise-release-more)

### Nari Labs — Dia-1.6B (Apr 24, 2025)

Nari Labs released Dia, a 1.6B parameter open-weights text-to-speech model that absolutely blew up Twitter with its expressive, emotional dialogue generation, including laughs, coughs, and multi-speaker conversations. Built by a tiny team, it punches far above its weight against commercial TTS systems and supports voice cloning, with demos available on Fal.ai.

**1.6B** Parameters

- [X Post Highlight](https://x.com/altryne/status/1914421814455099680)
- [HF Model](https://huggingface.co/nari-labs/Dia-1.6B)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/nari-labs/dia)
- [Fal.ai Voice Clone Demo](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/dia-tts/voice-clone)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-voice-and-audio-innovations-emotional-tts-and-smarter-conversations)

### NVIDIA — Describe Anything (DAM-3B) (Apr 24, 2025)

NVIDIA dropped the Describe Anything Model (DAM-3B), a 3 billion parameter multimodal model for region-based image and video captioning. You can point it at a specific region of an image or video and it generates a detailed description of just that area. NVIDIA also published an accompanying DescribeAnything dataset and a Hugging Face demo.

**3B** Parameters

- [X Post](https://x.com/reach_vb/status/1914962078571356656)
- [HF Model](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/DAM-3B)
- [HF Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/nvidia/describe-anything-model-demo)
- [HF Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/DescribeAnythingDataset)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights-community-vision-and-efficiency)

### Sand AI — MAGI-1 (Apr 24, 2025)

Sand AI released MAGI-1, a 24B autoregressive diffusion model for long-form, streaming video generation with remarkable character consistency, often the Achilles' heel of AI video. It predicts video in 24-frame chunks with causal attention between them, enabling real-time streaming generation where compute doesn't scale with length. Nisten speculated it could be a major step toward usable AI-generated movies by solving the face/character consistency problem.

**24B** Parameters · **24** Frames per autoregressive chunk

- [X Post](https://x.com/SandAI_HQ/status/1914303284954996749)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/SandAI-org/Magi-1)
- [PDF Report](https://static.magi.world/static/files/MAGI_1.pdf)
- [HF Repo](https://huggingface.co/sand-ai/MAGI-1)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-vision-and-video-send-ai-s-surprise-release-more)

### Tencent — Hunyuan 3D 2.5 (Apr 24, 2025)

Tencent updated its 3D generation model to Hunyuan 3D 2.5, now boasting 10 billion parameters, up from 1B. They highlight massive leaps in precision with 1024-resolution geometry, high-quality textures with PBR support, and improved skeletal rigging for animation.

**10B** Parameters (up from 1B) · **1024** Geometry resolution

- [X Post](https://x.com/TencentHunyuan/status/1915026828013850791)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion-3d-quick-hits)

### ByteDance — Seaweed-7B (Apr 17, 2025)

ByteDance publicly presented Seaweed-7B, a 7B parameter video generation foundation model, showing competitive video quality from a comparatively small model. Details and demos were published at seaweed.video.

- [seaweed.video](https://seaweed.video/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### ByteDance — Seedream 3.0 (Apr 17, 2025)

ByteDance's Seed team announced Seedream 3.0, a powerful bilingual (Chinese/English) text-to-image model that generates native 2048x2048 images with fast inference of around 3 seconds for a 1K image on an A100. It challenges the top closed image generation models.

- [Tech post](https://team.doubao.com/en/tech/seedream3_0)
- [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11346)
- [AIbase news](https://www.aibase.com/news/17208)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion-3d-seedream-challenges-the-champs)

### Cohere — Embed 4 (Apr 17, 2025)

Cohere released Embed 4, a multimodal embedding model aimed at enterprise search and retrieval over mixed text and image documents. It is available through Cohere's API.

- [Blog](https://cohere.com/blog/embed-4)
- [Docs Changelog](https://docs.cohere.com/v2/changelog/embed-multimodal-v4)
- [X](https://x.com/cohere/status/1912128813104078999)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Google — DolphinGemma (Apr 17, 2025)

Google, with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, announced DolphinGemma, a ~400M parameter audio model based on the Gemma architecture using SoundStream audio tokenization. Trained on decades of recorded dolphin clicks, whistles and pulses, it aims to decipher structure in dolphin communication and runs on a Pixel phone for field deployment.

- [Blog](https://blog.google/technology/ai/dolphingemma/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-voice-audio-talking-to-dolphins)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.5 Flash (Apr 17, 2025)

Google answered OpenAI's launch week with Gemini 2.5 Flash, a fast reasoning model that introduces controllable thinking budgets so developers can dial how much the model reasons per request. It is available through the Gemini API and developer platform.

- [Blog Post](https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-update-flash-extension/)
- [API Docs](https://ai.google.dev/docs)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Kling AI — Kling 2.0 (Apr 17, 2025)

Kuaishou's Kling AI launched Kling 2.0 along with a broader Creative Suite, upgrading its video generation model and tooling. The release kept up the rapid pace in the closed-source video generation race during a packed vision and video week.

- [X](https://x.com/altryne/status/1912043121497850242)
- [Blog](https://klingai.com)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Microsoft — BitNet b1.58 (Apr 17, 2025)

Microsoft published BitNet (listed in the show notes as BitNet v1.5), its native 1.58-bit quantized LLM, as open weights on Hugging Face. The ternary-weight approach targets extremely efficient CPU inference at a fraction of the memory of standard models.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/microsoft/BitNet)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### OpenAI — GPT-4.1, 4.1-mini, 4.1-nano (Apr 17, 2025)

OpenAI released the GPT-4.1 family of models, available via API only, in three sizes: 4.1, 4.1-mini and 4.1-nano. The family features a 1M token context window, in contrast to o3's 200k, and is aimed at developers building on long-context and coding workloads.

- [Our Coverage](https://www.youtube.com/live/A5-Zxj816J0)
- [Prompting guide](https://x.com/noahmacca/status/1911898549308280911)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### OpenAI — o3 & o4-mini (Apr 17, 2025)

OpenAI shipped o3 and o4-mini in ChatGPT and the API, with o3 setting new SOTA records on Codeforces, SWE-bench, MMMU and more. For the first time the models can use tools (web search, Python, image generation) during the reasoning process, and they can think visually by cropping, zooming and rotating images. o3 scored $65k on the Freelancer eval versus o1's $28k, and o4-mini hits 99.5% on AIME with a Python interpreter.

**$65** o3 score on the Freelancer eval ($65k vs o1's $28k) · **99.5%** o4-mini on AIME with Python interpreter · **200** context window (200k tokens)

- [Blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-o3-and-o4-mini/)
- [Watch Party](https://youtube.com/live/2G-VwWxKCkk?feature=share)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-openai-o3-o4-mini-sota-reasoning-meets-tool-use-blog-watch-party)

### Prime Intellect — INTELLECT-2 (Apr 17, 2025)

Prime Intellect released INTELLECT-2, a 32B reasoning model trained with globally decentralized reinforcement learning, a follow-up to the INTELLECT-1 decentralized pretraining run covered on the show in December. The release includes open weights on Hugging Face, a tech report, and the PRIME-RL training code.

- [Blog](https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-2)
- [X](https://x.com/primeintellect_ai)
- [Blog](https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/intellect-2-release)
- [Tech report](https://primeintellect.ai/intellect-2)
- [Weights on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/PrimeIntellect/INTELLECT-2)
- [PRIME-RL code](https://github.com/primeintellect/prime-rl)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Zhipu AI (Z.ai) — GLM-4-0414 (Apr 17, 2025)

Z.ai, the rebranded Zhipu AI / chatGLM team, released the GLM-4-0414 family of open-source models. The drop includes base, reasoning and rumination variants published on Hugging Face and GitHub.

- [X](https://x.com/Zai_org/status/1779846143024941199)
- [HF Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/THUDM)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-4)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Amazon — Nova Sonic (Apr 10, 2025)

Amazon announced Nova Sonic, a foundational speech-to-speech model that unifies speech understanding and generation for real-time, natural-sounding voice conversations. It is available through Amazon Bedrock as part of the Nova family.

- [Amazon blog: Nova Sonic](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation-at-amazon/nova-sonic-voice-speech-foundation-model)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Deep Cogito — Cogito v1 Preview (3B-70B) (Apr 10, 2025)

New lab Deep Cogito released the Cogito v1 Preview family of open models ranging from 3B to 70B parameters, claiming SOTA results at each size and beating DeepSeek's 70B distill. The models are available on Hugging Face, giving local AI enthusiasts the small-to-mid sizes Llama 4 skipped.

**3B-70B** Model size range

- [Deep Cogito research blog: Cogito v1 Preview](https://www.deepcogito.com/research/cogito-v1-preview)
- [Hugging Face: cogito-v1-preview-llama-70B](https://huggingface.co/deepcogito/cogito-v1-preview-llama-70B)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### HiDream AI — HiDream-I1-Dev (Apr 10, 2025)

HiDream released HiDream-I1-Dev, a 17B parameter open-weights image generation model under an MIT license. It became the new leading open-weights image generator, surpassing Flux 1.1 [pro] on quality benchmarks.

**17B** Parameters, MIT license

- [Hugging Face collection: HiDream-I1](https://huggingface.co/collections/HiDream-ai/hidream-i1-67f3e90dd509fed088a158b3)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Jina AI — Jina Reranker M0 (Apr 10, 2025)

Jina AI released Jina Reranker M0, a state-of-the-art multimodal and multilingual document reranker model. It reranks documents that include both text and images, targeting retrieval and RAG pipelines, with weights available on Hugging Face.

- [Jina blog: Reranker M0](https://jina.ai/news/jina-reranker-m0-multilingual-multimodal-document-reranker/)
- [Hugging Face: jina-reranker-m0](https://huggingface.co/jinaai/jina-reranker-m0)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Meta AI — Llama 4 (Scout & Maverick) (Apr 10, 2025)

Meta released the long-awaited Llama 4 family in a chaotic Saturday drop: Scout (17B active / ~109B total, 16 experts) and Maverick (17B active / ~400B total, 128 experts), with a 2T-parameter Behemoth still in training. The models are multimodal, multilingual MoE architectures trained on ~30T tokens with FP8 and interleaved attention (iRoPE), claiming 10M context for Scout and 1M for Maverick. The release was marred by drama: the LMArena version differed from the released model, and the community criticized the lack of small local-friendly sizes.

**10M** Stated context window for Llama 4 Scout · **288B** Active parameters of unreleased Behemoth (2T total) · **17B** Active parameters for both Scout and Maverick

- [Meta blog: Llama 4 multimodal intelligence](https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/)
- [Hugging Face: meta-llama](https://huggingface.co/meta-llama)
- [Try it at meta.ai](https://meta.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025#sec-open-source-ai-llms-llama-4-takes-center-stage-amidst-some-drama)

### Moonshot AI (Kimi) — Kimi-VL & Kimi-VL-Thinking (Apr 10, 2025)

Moonshot AI released Kimi-VL and Kimi-VL-Thinking, compact vision-language models with only ~3B active parameters (A3B MoE). The thinking variant adds reasoning to a tiny VLM, and both are available openly on Hugging Face.

**A3B** ~3B active parameters (MoE)

- [Hugging Face collection: Kimi-VL-A3B](https://huggingface.co/collections/moonshotai/kimi-vl-a3b-67f67b6ac91d3b03d382dd85)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025#sec-vision-video-kimi-drops-tiny-but-mighty-vlms)

### NVIDIA — Llama-3.1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B (Apr 10, 2025)

NVIDIA released Nemotron Ultra, a pruned and distilled finetune of Llama 3.1-405B at roughly half the parameters (253B). Its benchmarks even included Llama 4 comparisons, showing the older finetuned Llama beating the new models on AIME, GPQA and more. It supports 128K context and fits on a single 8xH100 node for inference.

**253B** Parameters (pruned from Llama 3.1-405B) · **128K** Context window

- [Hugging Face: Llama-3_1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3_1-Nemotron-Ultra-253B-v1)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/kuchaev/status/1909444566379573646)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025#sec-nvidia-nemotron-ultra-is-finally-here-253b-pruned-llama-3-405b-hf)

### Together AI & Agentica (UC Berkeley) — DeepCoder-14B-Preview (Apr 10, 2025)

Together AI and Agentica (UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab) released DeepCoder-14B-Preview, a reasoning model finetuned with RL that beats DeepSeek R1 and even o3-mini on several coding benchmarks. The project aims to democratize RL: the team open-sourced the model, the training dataset, the Weights & Biases logs, and the eval logs. Guest Michael Luo from Agentica joined the show to discuss the release.

**14B** Model parameters

- [Together AI blog: DeepCoder](https://www.together.ai/blog/deepcoder)
- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/togethercompute/status/1909697124805333208)
- [Hugging Face: DeepCoder-14B-Preview](https://huggingface.co/agentica-org/DeepCoder-14B-Preview)
- [Hugging Face dataset: DeepCoder-Preview-Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/agentica-org/DeepCoder-Preview-Dataset)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025#sec-together-ai-agentica-berkley-finetuned-deepcoder-14b-with-reasoning-x-blog)

### All Hands AI — OpenHands LM 32B (Apr 3, 2025)

All Hands AI (formerly OpenDevin) released OpenHands LM 32B, an MIT-licensed Qwen finetune that scores 37.2% on SWE-Bench Verified, competing with much larger models on real-world repo tasks. The OpenHands agent also took the #2 spot on the new Live SWE-Bench leaderboard, and the 32B model runs locally on a single RTX 3090. A hosted OpenHands Cloud version is also available; guest Xingyao Wang joined the show to discuss it.

**37.2%** SWE-Bench Verified score · **#2** Live SWE-Bench leaderboard (OpenHands agent)

- [Introducing OpenHands LM 32B (blog)](https://www.all-hands.dev/blog/introducing-openhands-lm-32b----a-strong-open-coding-agent-model)
- [Model on Hugging Face (MIT license)](https://huggingface.co/all-hands/openhands-lm-32b-v0.1)
- [OpenHands Cloud](https://app.all-hands.dev/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-openhands-lm-32b-agent-accessible-sota-coding)

### Gladia — Solaria STT (Apr 3, 2025)

Gladia launched Solaria, a new speech-to-text model offered through its transcription platform. It arrived in a busy week for voice AI alongside Hailuo's Speech-02 TTS.

- [Gladia Solaria](https://www.gladia.io/solaria)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-voice-highlight-hailuo-speech-02)

### HKU NLP (University of Hong Kong) — Dream 7B (Apr 3, 2025)

Researchers unveiled Dream 7B, a diffusion-based language model that posts strong benchmark results, notably on planning-style tasks like Sudoku, possibly because parallel generation handles global constraints better than autoregression. It hints at viable alternative LLM architectures, but the weights were not yet released at show time, so results could not be independently verified.

- [Dream 7B blog post](https://hkunlp.github.io/blog/2025/dream/)
- [Benchmark results thread (Sudoku)](https://x.com/JiachengYe15/status/1907430553369883017)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-dream-7b-a-diffusion-language-model-challenger)

### Nomic AI — Nomic Embed Multimodal (Apr 3, 2025)

Nomic AI released Nomic Embed Multimodal, new 3B and 7B parameter embedding models built on Alibaba's Qwen2.5-VL. They achieve SOTA on visual document retrieval by embedding interleaved text-image sequences, ideal for PDFs and complex webpages. The 7B model ships under Apache 2.0 with open weights, code, and data; guest Zach Nussbaum discussed the release on the show.

**3B** parameters (smaller model) · **7B** parameters (Apache 2.0 model)

- [Nomic Embed Multimodal blog post](https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/nomic-embed-multimodal)
- [Models on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/collections/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-multimodal-67e5ddc1a890a19ff0d58073)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-nomic-embed-multimodal-sota-embeddings-for-visual-docs)

### Runway — Runway Gen-4 (Apr 3, 2025)

Runway announced Gen-4, its next-generation video model focused on character and world consistency across shots. Example videos showed notably coherent characters and scenes, pushing AI video further toward usable filmmaking.

- [Introducing Runway Gen-4](https://runwayml.com/research/introducing-runway-gen-4)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-vision-video-entering-the-uncanny-valley)

## Products & Apps

### Character.AI — AvatarFX (Apr 24, 2025)

Character.AI announced AvatarFX, now in early access, which turns static images into speaking, emoting video avatars. It targets bringing characters to life for conversational and creative use cases.

- [Website](https://t.co/cdF6H58kBk)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-vision-and-video-send-ai-s-surprise-release-more)

### Mistral AI — Classifiers Factory (Apr 17, 2025)

Mistral announced Classifiers Factory, a service for building and training custom text classifiers on its platform. Covered as a quick item in the Big CO LLMs + APIs section of the show.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Anthropic — Claude Max plan (Apr 10, 2025)

Anthropic introduced a new Max subscription tier priced at $200 per month, offering significantly more usage quota than the standard Pro plan. It mirrors OpenAI's Pro-tier pricing strategy for power users.

**$200/mo** Max plan price

- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Google — Firebase Studio (Apr 10, 2025)

As part of a flood of announcements at Google Cloud Next 2025, Google launched Firebase Studio, a browser-based AI-powered environment for building and shipping full-stack apps. It was one of the headline developer-facing launches from the event.

- [Firebase Studio](https://firebase.studio/)
- [Google Cloud Next 2025 announcements](https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/next-2025/)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Amazon — Nova Act (Apr 3, 2025)

Amazon entered the agent race with Nova Act, an agent designed to take actions in web browsers, possibly built with talent from the Adept acquisition. Amazon claims it beats Claude 3.5 and OpenAI's computer-use model on some benchmarks, but it is only available via an SDK behind a request form, so claims could not be verified hands-on.

- [Nova Act announcement (Amazon Science)](https://labs.amazon.science/blog/nova-act)
- [Access request form](https://nova.amazon.com)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-amazon-s-nova-act-agent-the-need-for-access)

### ByteDance — OmniHuman (via Dreamina) (Apr 3, 2025)

ByteDance's impressive OmniHuman model, which turns a single image plus audio into a realistic talking avatar video, became publicly usable through the Dreamina (CapCut) website. The results land squarely in uncanny-valley territory, as Alex demonstrated with his own avatar thread.

- [OmniHuman on Dreamina](https://dreamina.capcut.com/ai-tool/video/lip-sync/generate)
- [Example thread by Alex](https://x.com/altryne/status/1907173680456794187)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-vision-video-entering-the-uncanny-valley)

### Cognition Labs — Devin 2.0 (Apr 3, 2025)

Breaking during the show: Cognition Labs launched Devin 2.0, the second version of its AI software engineer, with a new IDE experience. Crucially, pricing now starts at $20/month, down from the original $500/month tier, making the agent far more accessible.

**$20/mo** new starting price

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-tool-update-breaking-news)

## Major Features & Updates

### Anthropic — Claude Research (Apr 17, 2025)

Anthropic shipped a Research capability for Claude, letting it conduct multi-step research across the web, alongside a Google Workspace integration that connects Claude to email, calendar and docs context.

- [Blog](https://www.anthropic.com/news/research)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Google DeepMind — Veo 2 (Apr 17, 2025)

Google made Veo 2 video generation generally available for developers and rolled it out in the Gemini App. The GA release brings Google's flagship text-to-video model out of preview and into production use.

- [Dev Blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/veo-2-video-generation-now-generally-available/)
- [Try It](http://ai.dev)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025)

### Weights & Biases — W&B Weave Playground (Apr 17, 2025)

The Weights & Biases Weave Playground shipped full support for the new GPT-4.1 family and the o3/o4-mini models, letting developers evaluate and compare the week's new models for their own applications.

- [X](https://x.com/weave_wb/status/1912246450857341092)
- [W&B Weave](https://wandb.ai/site/weave?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=apr17)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-this-week-s-buzz-playground-updates-a-deep-dive-into-a2a)

### Google DeepMind — Official MCP support (Apr 10, 2025)

Demis Hassabis announced that Google will officially support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its models and SDKs. This was a major signal of MCP becoming the industry standard for connecting AI models to tools and data.

- [Demis Hassabis announcement on X](https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1910107859041271977)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT enhanced memory (Apr 10, 2025)

OpenAI rolled out enhanced memory for ChatGPT, allowing it to reference and recall all of a user's previous conversations rather than just saved memories. This makes ChatGPT significantly more personalized across sessions.

- [OpenAI announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1910378768172212636)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Google — NotebookLM source discovery (Apr 3, 2025)

Google's NotebookLM added a source discovery feature that finds and suggests related sources for a notebook, instead of relying solely on user-uploaded documents. It extends NotebookLM further into research-assistant territory.

- [Google blog: NotebookLM discover sources](https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/notebooklm-discover-sources/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-tool-update-breaking-news)

### OpenAI — ChatGPT "Monday" voice (Apr 3, 2025)

OpenAI added a new "Monday" voice to ChatGPT's voice mode, an EMO-flavored persona released around April 1st. It rounds out a week of OpenAI shipping across models, evals, and product.

- [OpenAI announcement on X](https://x.com/OpenAI/status/1907124258867982338)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-openai-makes-waves-open-source-tease-tough-evals-billions-raised)

### Windsurf — Windsurf Netlify deployments (Apr 3, 2025)

Windsurf shipped a deployments feature that lets users push apps straight to Netlify from the editor. A small but practical step toward end-to-end app building inside AI coding tools.

- [Windsurf announcement on X](https://x.com/windsurf_ai/status/1907497638267924566)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-tool-update-breaking-news)

## APIs & Platforms

### OpenAI — gpt-image-1 (Apr 24, 2025)

OpenAI's powerful image generation capabilities, previously locked inside ChatGPT, are now available to developers via API under the official name gpt-image-1. This was the big one many developers were waiting for, opening up the viral image generation and editing capabilities for building AI art and image editing applications.

- [X Post](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1915097067023900883)
- [Docs](https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/image-generation?image-generation-model=gpt-image-1)
- [API Reference](https://platform.openai.com/docs/api-reference/images)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-big-companies-apis-gpt-image-and-grok-get-developer-access)

### xAI — Grok 3 API (Apr 10, 2025)

xAI made Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini available via API, giving developers programmatic access to its frontier models for the first time. The Grok app also received updates the same week.

- [xAI API models and pricing](https://docs.x.ai/docs/models#models-and-pricing)
- [API Docs](https://docs.x.ai/docs/overview)
- [App Update X Post](https://x.com/ebbyamir/status/1914820712092852430)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Hailuo AI (MiniMax) — Speech-02 (Apr 3, 2025)

Hailuo (MiniMax) released the Speech-02 TTS API, which Alex called potentially state of the art for emotional control and voice cloning quality. It produces nuanced, realistic synthetic voices and was the standout voice release of the week.

- [Hailuo Speech-02 announcement on X](https://x.com/Hailuo_AI/status/1906723587379101923)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-voice-highlight-hailuo-speech-02)

## Dev Tools

### HumanLayer — 12-Factor Agents (Apr 24, 2025)

HumanLayer founder Dex Horthy published 12-Factor Agents, an open GitHub repo and essay distilling common patterns and pitfalls for building reliable, production-ready AI agents. Drawing on his experience building agent SDKs, it argues that serious teams end up writing large parts from scratch and lays out principles for robust agent design, discussed in depth on the show.

- [GitHub Repo](https://github.com/humanlayer/12-factor-agents/tree/main)
- [Webinar Recording](https://lu.ma/12-factor-agent)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 23rd - GPT Image & Grok APIs Drop, OpenAI ❤️ OS? Dia's Wild TTS & Building Better Agents!](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-24-2025#sec-agent-development-insights-building-robust-agents-with-dex-horthy)

### OpenAI — Codex CLI (Apr 17, 2025)

OpenAI released Codex CLI, an open source coding tool for the terminal. It ships with hardened security, using Apple Seatbelt on macOS to limit execution to the current directory plus temp files.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/openai/codex)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-openai-open-sources-mrcr-eval-and-codex-mrcr-hf-codex-github)

### Cloudflare — Agents SDK (Apr 10, 2025)

Cloudflare shipped a new Agents SDK for building and deploying AI agents on its edge platform. It joins the week's wave of agent infrastructure announcements alongside Google's A2A and broad MCP adoption.

- [agents.cloudflare.com](https://agents.cloudflare.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### GitMCP (Liad Yosef & Ido Salomon) — GitMCP (Apr 10, 2025)

Creators Liad Yosef and Ido Salomon launched GitMCP, a free tool that turns any GitHub repository into an MCP server by simply swapping the domain (gitmcp.io/user/repo). It lets AI assistants ground themselves in a repo's docs and code, and the creators joined the show to demo it.

- [GitMCP](https://gitmcp.io/)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

## Papers & Research

### ByteDance — Seed-Thinking-v1.5 (Apr 10, 2025)

ByteDance's Seed team published Seed-Thinking-v1.5, a new reasoning model announced via a technical report on GitHub. It was mentioned among the week's open-source LLM news, though weights were not released at the time.

- [GitHub: Seed-Thinking-v1.5](https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Seed-Thinking-v1.5)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Stanford / NVIDIA / UCSD / UC Berkeley — One-Minute Video Generation with Test-Time Training (Apr 10, 2025)

Researchers published 'One-Minute Video Generation with Test-Time Training', adding TTT layers to a pre-trained transformer to one-shot generate minute-long videos with remarkable character and scene consistency. The Tom & Jerry style demos showed the most impressive long-form AI video consistency to date.

**1 min** Single-shot generated video length

- [Project blog](https://t.co/BSHsucizoG)
- [Paper](https://t.co/agJKUAExpz)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025#sec-vision-video-kimi-drops-tiny-but-mighty-vlms)

### Meta AI — MoCha (Apr 3, 2025)

Meta GenAI researchers published MoCha, a model that generates stunningly realistic, movie-grade talking characters directly from speech plus text. Co-author Cong Wei joined the show to discuss the work, which points at AI actors entering Hollywood-quality territory.

- [MoCha project page](https://congwei1230.github.io/MoCha/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-vision-video-entering-the-uncanny-valley)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### OpenAI — MRCR (Apr 17, 2025)

OpenAI open sourced MRCR, a benchmark dataset for evaluating long-context, complex retrieval tasks, building on Gemini research from Google and publishing the dataset on Hugging Face.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/mrcr)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 17 - OpenAI o3 is SOTA llm, o4-mini, 4.1, mini, nano, G. Flash 2.5, Kling 2.0 and 🐬 Gemma? Huge AI week + A2A protocol interview](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-17-2025#sec-openai-open-sources-mrcr-eval-and-codex-mrcr-hf-codex-github)

### CoreWeave — CoreWeave GB200 inference benchmark (Apr 3, 2025)

CoreWeave announced record-breaking AI inference benchmarks using NVIDIA's new GB200 Grace Blackwell superchips: 800 tokens/sec on Llama 3.1 405B, plus 33,000 tokens/sec on Llama 2 70B with H200s. It is a marker of how fast inference hardware is accelerating.

**800 tok/s** Llama 3.1 405B on GB200 · **33,000 tok/s** Llama 2 70B on H200

- [CoreWeave press release](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/coreweave-achieves-new-record-breaking-ai-inferencing-benchmark-with-nvidia-gb200-grace-blackwell-superchips-302418682.html)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-coreweave-nvidia-insane-speeds)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.5 Pro USAMO results (Apr 3, 2025)

New evaluation results published this week showed Gemini 2.5 Pro scoring 24.4% on the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO), problems so hard that most top models score under 5%. The result showcases a step change in frontier reasoning ability on competition mathematics.

**24.4%** Gemini 2.5 Pro USAMO score · **<5%** typical score for other top models

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-gemini-2-5-obliterates-olympiad-math-24-4-on-usamo)

### OpenAI — PaperBench (Apr 3, 2025)

OpenAI published PaperBench, a tough new evaluation that tests whether AI agents can replicate cutting-edge AI research papers, with more than 8,300 graded tasks and meta-evaluation of the LLM judge. The best model managed only a 21.0% replication score versus 41.4% for human PhDs. The code and the Nano-Eval framework were open sourced on GitHub alongside the paper.

**8,300+** graded tasks in the benchmark · **21.0%** best model replication score · **41.4%** human PhD baseline score

- [PaperBench announcement](https://openai.com/index/paperbench/)
- [PaperBench code on GitHub](https://github.com/openai/preparedness/tree/main/project/paperbench)
- [PaperBench paper (PDF)](https://cdn.openai.com/papers/22265bac-3191-44e5-b057-7aaacd8e90cd/paperbench.pdf)
- [Nano-Eval framework (openai/preparedness)](https://github.com/openai/preparedness)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-openai-makes-waves-open-source-tease-tough-evals-billions-raised)

## Funding

### OpenAI — OpenAI $40B funding round (Apr 3, 2025)

OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation, one of the largest private raises ever. The show noted the raise rode the wave of native image generation in ChatGPT, with especially strong growth in India.

**$40B** capital raised · **$300B** post-money valuation

- [OpenAI: Investing in our mission](https://openai.com/index/investing-in-our-mission/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-openai-makes-waves-open-source-tease-tough-evals-billions-raised)

## Also Released

### Google — Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol (Apr 10, 2025)

Google announced the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol at Cloud Next, an open spec for agents from different vendors to discover and communicate with each other. The spec was published on GitHub with a long list of launch partners, including Weights & Biases.

- [Google Developers blog: A2A](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/)
- [A2A spec on GitHub](https://github.com/google/A2A)
- [W&B partnership blog](https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/product-announcements-fc/reports/Powering-Agent-Collaboration-Weights-Biases-Partners-with-Google-Cloud-on-Agent2Agent-Interoperability-Protocol---VmlldzoxMjE3NDg3OA)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Weights & Biases — observable.tools & MCP RFC-269 (Apr 10, 2025)

Weights & Biases launched the observable.tools initiative and published an RFC (RFC-269) proposing observability standards for the Model Context Protocol, inviting community comment. W&B also announced it is a launch partner for Google's A2A protocol.

- [observable.tools](https://observable.tools)
- [MCP RFC](http://wandb.me/mcp-spec)
- [W&B + Google A2A partnership blog](https://wandb.ai/wandb_fc/product-announcements-fc/reports/Powering-Agent-Collaboration-Weights-Biases-Partners-with-Google-Cloud-on-Agent2Agent-Interoperability-Protocol---VmlldzoxMjE3NDg3OA)
- Podcast coverage: [💯 ThursdAI - 100th episode 🎉 - Meta LLama 4, Google tons of updates, ChatGPT memory, WandB MCP manifesto & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-10-2025)

### Weights & Biases — Observable Tools (Apr 3, 2025)

Alex and Weights & Biases launched the Observable Tools initiative to bring observability to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, since external tool calls currently lose visibility for debugging and security. A concrete proposal using OpenTelemetry was posted to the MCP specification GitHub discussions for community feedback.

- [Observable.tools](https://observable.tools/)
- [OpenTelemetry proposal on MCP spec GitHub](https://github.com/model-context-protocol/specification/discussions/18)
- [Viral MCP clients tweet](https://x.com/altryne/status/1906180131540066796)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Apr 3rd - OpenAI Goes Open?! Gemini Crushes Math, AI Actors Go Hollywood & MCP, Now with Observability?](https://thursdai.news/ep/apr-03-2025#sec-this-week-s-buzz-let-s-make-mcp-observable)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in April 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-04), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-04 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in March 2025

> 60 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-03


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen2.5-Omni-7B (Mar 27, 2025)

Qwen released Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, an open-weights omni-modal model that perceives text, images, audio, and video, and generates both text and speech. It packs end-to-end multimodal perception and spoken output into a 7B parameter model available on Hugging Face.

**7B** parameters

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Omni-7B)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek-V3-0324 (Mar 27, 2025)

DeepSeek silently updated their V3 base model with DeepSeek-V3-0324, a 685B parameter MoE released on Hugging Face under the MIT license. This is not R1 (their reasoning model) but the powerful base model R1 was built on, and supposedly the base for a future R2.

**685B** parameters

- [X announcement](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1904526863604883661)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-open-source-llms)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.5 Pro (Mar 27, 2025)

Google dropped Gemini 2.5 Pro, a thinking model that took the #1 spot as the best all-around LLM available, with massive jumps on benchmarks like AIME (up nearly 20 points) and GPQA. It inherits native multimodality and a 1M token context window, maintaining high accuracy even at 120k+ tokens on needle-in-a-haystack tests, with surprisingly low latency (~13 seconds on hard reasoning questions vs 45+ for others). Tulsee Doshi, head of product for Gemini models, joined the show to give the inside scoop.

**20** point jump on AIME benchmark · **1M** token context window · **13** seconds latency on hard reasoning questions (vs 45+ for others) · **120** k+ tokens with high long-context accuracy on Live Bench

- [X announcement (Jeff Dean)](https://x.com/JeffDean/status/1904580112248693039)
- [Official blog post](https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-model-thinking-updates-march-2025/)
- [Try it at ai.dev](http://ai.dev)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Ideogram — Ideogram 3.0 (Mar 27, 2025)

Ideogram launched version 3.0 of its image generation model with another SOTA claim. It is particularly strong on text and logo rendering, photorealism, and style references, continuing Ideogram's edge in typography-heavy image generation.

- [Ideogram 3.0 announcement](https://about.ideogram.ai/3.0)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion-auto-regression)

### OpenAI — GPT-4o (2025-03-26) (Mar 27, 2025)

OpenAI shipped a new GPT-4o checkpoint (2025-03-26) that jumped over GPT-4.5 to tie for #1 on LMArena. The update landed as the show was being written, read as a direct response to Gemini 2.5's launch in the escalating frontier-model race.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-gpt-4o-got-another-update-as-i-m-writing-these-words-tied-for-1-on-lmarena-beating-4-5)

### Reve — Reve Image (Mar 27, 2025)

Reve launched a new diffusion image generation model claiming state-of-the-art quality, reportedly beating heavyweights like Midjourney and Flux at roughly a penny per image. The previously low-profile lab made a splash with strong prompt adherence and image quality.

- [X announcement (Taesung)](https://x.com/Taesung/status/1904220824435032528)
- [Decrypt coverage](https://decrypt.co/311375/new-reve-image-generator-beats-ai-art-heavyweights-midjourney-and-flux-at-a-penny-per-image)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion-auto-regression)

### Canopy Labs — Orpheus 3B (Mar 20, 2025)

Canopy Labs released Orpheus, an open speech language model that produces natural, human-sounding speech, headlined by a 3B model with smaller variants (1B, 500M, 150M) in the family. Weights are on Hugging Face with a Colab for trying it out, discussed on the show with Daily.co CEO Kwindla Kramer in the voice AI segment.

- [Blog](https://canopylabs.ai/model-releases)
- [HF](https://huggingface.co/canopylabs)
- [Colab](https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1xxPpBwI4l_nKUx0J0nzZTtikfqP3UJ6p?usp=sharing#scrollTo=lV49oiPFpbXL)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### LG AI Research — EXAONE Deep 32B (Mar 20, 2025)

LG AI Research open sourced its EXAONE family, headlined by EXAONE Deep 32B, a thinking/reasoning model. The release puts a large Korean lab's reasoning model in open weights on Hugging Face, and Alex published a live reaction video to the launch.

- [LG Blog](https://www.lgresearch.ai/blog/view?seq=543)
- [HuggingFace page](https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-Deep-32B)
- [Alex Reaction Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOfkhWh1zrI)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Mistral AI — Mistral Small 3.1 (Mar 20, 2025)

Mistral released Mistral Small 3.1, a 24B-parameter open-weights model that adds multimodal (vision) capabilities to the Small line. Both instruct and base checkpoints were published on Hugging Face, making it a strong local multimodal option at the 24B size class.

- [Blog Post](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-small-3-1)
- [HuggingFace page](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B-Instruct-2503)
- [Base Model on HF](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Small-3.1-24B)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-mistral-s-new-model-release)

### NVIDIA — Canary 1B/180M Flash (Mar 20, 2025)

NVIDIA released Canary 1B Flash and 180M Flash, Apache 2.0 licensed speech recognition and translation models built as Llama finetunes. The permissive license makes them freely usable for commercial ASR and translation workloads.

- [HF](https://huggingface.co/nvidia/canary-1b-flash)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### NVIDIA — Llama-Nemotron (Super 49B, Nano 8B) (Mar 20, 2025)

NVIDIA released the Llama-Nemotron family, including Super 49B and Nano 8B reasoning models, announced around GTC. Alongside the open weights, NVIDIA published the Llama-Nemotron post-training dataset, giving the community both the models and the data recipe behind them.

- [Announcement](https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/build-enterprise-ai-agents-with-advanced-open-nvidia-llama-nemotron-reasoning-models/)
- [X](https://x.com/kuchaev/status/1902078122792775771)
- [Llama-Nemotron HuggingFace Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/llama-nemotron-67d92346030a2691293f200b)
- [Dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/Llama-Nemotron-Post-Training-Dataset-v1)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-nvidia-s-nemotron-models)

### OpenAI — Next-gen audio models (gpt-4o-mini-tts & transcription) (Mar 20, 2025)

OpenAI launched a new emotionally steerable text-to-speech voice model plus two new transcription models, watched live on the show as a watch party. The TTS model can be instructed how to speak (tone, emotion, character), demoed at openai.fm, and the models are available through the API for voice agents.

- [Blog](https://openai.com/index/introducing-our-next-generation-audio-models/)
- [Youtube](https://youtu.be/hb-bwLcOMKs)
- [openai.fm](http://openai.fm)
- [Live watch party clip](https://x.com/altryne/status/1902470120313917732/video/1)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-openai-s-new-voice-models)

### Roboflow — RF-DETR (Mar 20, 2025)

Roboflow released RF-DETR, a state-of-the-art real-time object detection model, announced as breaking news on the show by CEO Joseph Nelson. The model is fully open source on GitHub and targets practical, deployable computer vision workloads.

- [RF-DETR Blog Post](https://blog.roboflow.com/rf-detr/#how-to-use-rf-detr)
- [RF-DETR Github](https://github.com/roboflow/rf-detr)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-roboflow-s-new-model-and-benchmark)

### StepFun — Step-Video-TI2V (Mar 20, 2025)

Chinese lab StepFun dropped Step-Video-TI2V, an open text/image-to-video generation model. Weights are on Hugging Face with code on GitHub, adding another open-weights option to the fast-moving video generation space.

- [TI2V HuggingFace Space](https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/stepvideo-ti2v)
- [TI2V Github](https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-TI2V)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Tencent — Hunyuan3D 2.0 MV & Turbo (Mar 20, 2025)

Tencent updated its Hunyuan3D 2.0 image-to-3D model with an MV (MultiView) version that conditions on multiple input views, plus a faster Turbo variant. The show highlighted it as new SOTA for 3D generation, available to try in a Hugging Face space.

- [Hunyuan3D-2mv HF Space](https://huggingface.co/spaces/tencent/Hunyuan3D-2mv)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) — OLMo 2 32B (Mar 13, 2025)

The Allen Institute for AI released OLMo 2 32B, its biggest fully open model yet, with weights, code, and dataset all published under Apache 2.0. Announced by Nathan Lambert as a last-second addition, it reportedly beats GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o mini as well as leading open-weight models like Qwen and Mistral at its size.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/natolambert/status/1900249185225703703)
- [Blog](https://t.co/MWEyDIJMGo)
- [Try It](https://t.co/QBVnWRcP0y)
- [Follow-up tweet](https://x.com/natolambert/status/1900249099343192573)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### ByteDance — Seedream 2.0 (Mar 13, 2025)

ByteDance released Seedream 2.0, a native Chinese-English bilingual image generation foundation model, alongside a technical paper. It emphasizes excellent text rendering (especially Chinese), cultural nuance, and human preference alignment, generating high-quality, culturally relevant images from prompts in either language.

- [Blog](https://team.doubao.com/en/tech/seedream)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.07703)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Cohere — Command A (Mar 13, 2025)

Cohere announced Command A, a 111B parameter open-weights model with a 256K context window, presented on the show by Cohere's Sandra Kublik. It runs on only two GPUs where models of this size typically require around 32, and is built for enterprise use: agentic tasks, tool use, multilingual performance, and secure private deployments.

- [Blog](https://cohere.com/blog/command-a)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025#sec-cohere-s-command-a-model)

### EuroBERT team — EuroBERT (Mar 13, 2025)

EuroBERT is a new family of multilingual encoder models ranging from 210M to 2.1B parameters, trained on a 5 trillion-token dataset across 15 languages with 8K context support. It targets European and global language NLP tasks like retrieval and RAG, where properly encoding non-English character sets matters.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Google DeepMind — Gemma 3 (Mar 13, 2025)

Google released Gemma 3, an open-weights model family spanning 1B to 27B parameters with multimodal (text, image, video) capabilities, support for over 140 languages, and a 128K context window. The 27B model runs on a single GPU, with Sundar Pichai claiming competitors need roughly 10x the compute for similar performance. It shipped with day-one open source ecosystem support (Hugging Face, Ollama, Kaggle) plus ShieldGemma 2 for content moderation.

- [Blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemma3/)
- [AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat?model=gemma-3-27b-it)
- [HF Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/google/gemma-3-release-67c6c6f89c4f76621268bb6d)
- [Hugging Face (27B)](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-3-27b-it)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025#sec-google-s-gemma-3-release)

### HPC-AI Tech — Open-Sora 2.0 (Mar 13, 2025)

OpenSora 2.0 is an 11B parameter open-source video generation model that claims state-of-the-art results while costing only about $200,000 to train. The team claims performance approaching OpenAI's Sora on some benchmarks, underscoring how fast open-source video generation is improving.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora?tab=readme-ov-file)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Nous Research — DeepHermes 3 (24B / 3B) (Mar 13, 2025)

Nous Research released DeepHermes hybrid reasoners at 24B (Mistral-based) and 3B sizes, models that can toggle between standard chat responses and long chain-of-thought reasoning. The 24B preview is available on Hugging Face as part of the week's wave of open-source reasoning model releases.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/NousResearch/status/1900218445763088766)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/DeepHermes-3-Mistral-24B-Preview)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Reka AI — Reka Flash 3 (Mar 13, 2025)

Reka AI open sourced Reka Flash 3, a 21B parameter reasoning model released under an Apache 2.0 license and trained with the REINFORCE Leave One-Out (RLOO) reinforcement learning technique. It excels at chat, coding, instruction following, and function calling, with Nisten calling it possibly one of the best ~20B models available.

- [Blog](https://www.reka.ai/news/introducing-reka-flash)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/RekaAI/reka-flash-3)
- [X announcement](https://x.com/RekaAILabs/status/1899481289495031825)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Remade AI — Wan 2.1 14B I2V LoRA video effects (Mar 13, 2025)

Remade AI published eight LoRA video effects for Alibaba's Wan 2.1 14B image-to-video model, including effects like squish, inflate, deflate, and cakeify. The open release shows video effects becoming trainable and customizable via LoRAs on top of open video models.

- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/Remade-AI/wan21-14b-480p-i2v-loras-67d0e26f08092436b585919b)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### AI21 Labs — Jamba 1.6 Large & Mini (Mar 6, 2025)

AI21 Labs released Jamba 1.6 in Large and Mini sizes, updating its hybrid SSM-Transformer (Mamba-based) model family with open weights on Hugging Face. The Jamba architecture targets long-context efficiency compared to pure transformer models.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/AI21Labs/status/1897657953261601151)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ai21labs/AI21-Jamba-Large-1.6)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — QwQ-32B (Mar 6, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team released QwQ-32B, an open-weights reasoning model that matches DeepSeek R1 on several evals despite being roughly 20x smaller at 32B parameters. Qwen tech lead Junyang Lin joined the show to announce it, and the episode dubbed it Alibaba's 'R1 killer' for bringing strong reasoning to a size that runs on consumer hardware.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1897361654763151544)
- [Blog](https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwq-32b/)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/QwQ-32B)
- [Chat Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Qwen/QwQ-32B-Demo)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025#sec-qwq-model-announcement)

### Cohere For AI — Aya Vision (Mar 6, 2025)

Cohere For AI released Aya Vision in 8B and 32B sizes, extending the multilingual Aya family with open-weights vision-language capabilities. The models target multilingual multimodal understanding across many languages.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/CohereForAI/status/1896923657470886234)
- [Hugging Face Collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/CohereForAI/c4ai-aya-vision-67c4ccd395ca064308ee1484)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### ElectricAlexis (research) — NotaGen (Mar 6, 2025)

NotaGen is an open symbolic music generation model that produces high-quality classical sheet music rather than raw audio. The release includes code on GitHub, weights on Hugging Face, and a browser demo.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/ElectricAlexis/NotaGen)
- [Demo](https://electricalexis.github.io/notagen-demo/)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/ElectricAlexis/NotaGen)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### MiniMax — Image-01 (Mar 6, 2025)

MiniMax released Image-01, a versatile text-to-image model the company positions at roughly one tenth the cost of competing image generation offerings. It is available through MiniMax's hosted platform.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/MiniMax__AI/status/1896475931809817015)
- [Try It](https://t.co/ATyAN03H1F)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### Tencent — HunyuanVideo-I2V (Mar 6, 2025)

Tencent finally shipped the long-awaited image-to-video version of HunyuanVideo, with open weights on Hugging Face and a hosted try-it experience. It lets users animate still images using one of the strongest open video generation models.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/TXhunyuan/status/1897558826519556325)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tencent/HunyuanVideo-I2V)
- [Try It](https://video.hunyuan.tencent.com/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### Zhipu AI (GLM) — CogView 4 (6B) (Mar 6, 2025)

Zhipu AI released CogView 4, a 6B-parameter open text-to-image model in the CogView family, with code available on GitHub. It is notable as an open-weights image generation option with strong Chinese and English prompt support.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ChatGLM/status/1896824917880148450)
- [GitHub](https://t.co/O8btwDugWI)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

## Products & Apps

### Arcee AI — Arcee Conductor (Mar 20, 2025)

Arcee AI's Lucas Atkins joined the show to announce Conductor, a model router that picks the best model (including Arcee's small specialized models) for each query. It targets cost and quality optimization by routing requests instead of sending everything to one large model.

- [X](https://x.com/LucasAtkins7/status/1901666078620537339)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-introducing-conductor-by-rc)

### Manus AI — Manus (Mar 13, 2025)

Manus is a new AI research agent (manus.im) that creates a to-do list, browses the web in a real Chrome browser, and generates files, described on the show as 'Operator on steroids' and seemingly powered by Claude 3.7 behind the scenes. The crew tested it live on a research task and praised its slick UI.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Elysian Labs — Auren (Mar 6, 2025)

Elysian Labs (from nearcyan) launched Auren, an iOS app offering an emotionally attuned AI companion experience. The launch drew attention for its polished consumer approach to AI companionship.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1897466463314936034)
- [App](https://auren.app)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### Google — AI Mode & AI Overviews (Gemini 2.0) (Mar 6, 2025)

Google announced AI Mode, a new conversational search experience in Google Search, alongside Gemini 2.0-powered upgrades to AI Overviews. Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, joined the show for an exclusive interview about the launch, which brings full AI chat-style answers with follow-ups directly into Search.

- [Google Blog](https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-search/)
- [Alex's Reaction (X)](https://x.com/altryne/status/1897381479459811368)
- [Live Reaction Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QTveQpq1WI)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025#sec-google-s-ai-innovations)

### Sesame — Sesame conversational voice demo (Maya) (Mar 6, 2025)

Sesame released a demo of its conversational speech model featuring the Maya voice, and its naturalness, with human-like pauses, laughs, and interruptions, went viral across the AI community. Alex recorded a reaction conversation with Maya showcasing how lifelike the voice model is.

- [Alex's Conversation with Maya (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI_WARqK_X4&t=1s)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

## Major Features & Updates

### OpenAI — ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode (semantic VAD) (Mar 27, 2025)

Alongside the image generation launch, OpenAI quietly updated ChatGPT's advanced voice mode with semantic voice activity detection. The model now understands when you have actually finished speaking rather than cutting in on pauses, leading to much more natural conversation flow.

- [YouTube announcement](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm4djPNO8os)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-voice-audio)

### OpenAI — GPT-4o Native Image Generation (Mar 27, 2025)

OpenAI finally enabled GPT-4o's native auto-regressive image generation in ChatGPT, sparking the biggest mainstream AI buzz of the week as the internet ghiblified itself. Launched right after Gemini 2.5, it excels at instruction following, text rendering, and multi-turn editing, with viral demos ranging from ad mockups to a full Lord of the Rings trailer.

- [X thread with examples](https://x.com/GrantSlatton/status/1904631016356274286)
- [Ad threads](https://x.com/mrgreen/status/1904886576951300495)
- [Full Lord of the Rings trailer](https://x.com/PJaccetturo/status/1905151190872309907)
- [Native Image Generation System Card](https://cdn.openai.com/11998be9-5319-4302-bfbf-1167e093f1fb/Native_Image_Generation_System_Card.pdf)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-ai-art-diffusion-auto-regression)

### OpenAI — MCP support in OpenAI Agents SDK (Mar 27, 2025)

OpenAI officially announced support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its Agents SDK, effectively settling the agent tool-connectivity standards war in MCP's favor. Possibly more impactful long-term than the week's flashier launches, since the entire ecosystem can now converge on one protocol for connecting models to tools and data.

- [OpenAI Agents SDK MCP docs](https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/mcp/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-agents-tools-mcp)

### Cursor — Claude 3.7 MAX (Mar 20, 2025)

Cursor shipped Claude 3.7 MAX, a mode giving the agent the full context window and higher tool-call limits with Claude 3.7 Sonnet. It is aimed at harder, longer coding tasks at premium usage-based pricing.

- [X](https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/1902123296231195047)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Google — Gemini Deep Research, Canvas & Live Previews (Mar 20, 2025)

Google made its Deep Research agent free for Gemini users and shipped Canvas, a collaborative workspace with live previews for code and documents. Demos on the show included a playable Tetris game and a markdown word counter built and previewed directly inside Gemini.

- [X](https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1902042453080760404)
- [Tetris game](https://g.co/gemini/share/f6643450f880)
- [markdown enabled word counter](https://g.co/gemini/share/eea30bfd11f2)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Google — NotebookLM Mind Maps (Mar 20, 2025)

Google's NotebookLM team previewed Mind Maps, a feature that turns your uploaded sources into interactive visual maps of concepts. It was teased publicly by the team this week ahead of a wider rollout.

- [X](https://x.com/tokumin/status/1902251588925915429)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Google — Google AI Studio YouTube link understanding (Mar 13, 2025)

Google AI Studio now lets you drop a YouTube link and have Gemini natively understand the video. This unlocks video analysis, summarization, and support use cases without downloading or preprocessing the content.

- [Google AI Studio](https://aistudio.google.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Google — Gemini Deep Research (free tier) (Mar 13, 2025)

Google made its Deep Research agent free for everyone in the Gemini app and upgraded it to run on Gemini Thinking. In a live test on the show it browsed over 150 websites to compile a comprehensive answer, with a polished interface and export to Google Docs.

- [Try It no cost](https://gemini.google.com/app)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.0 Flash native image generation (Mar 13, 2025)

Google enabled native image generation in Gemini Flash Experimental, letting users generate and iteratively edit images conversationally inside the same multimodal model. The crew demoed it live on stream, editing photos of themselves with natural-language instructions, and saw it as a preview of how creative tools like Photoshop will work.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/1899896275652202927)
- [AI Studio demo](https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts/1bRqkN58xP6x3H1wTfQ84HaMi6R19vhLz)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025#sec-native-image-generation-with-gemini)

### xAI — Grok Voice (Mar 6, 2025)

xAI made Grok's voice mode available to free users, removing the paid-tier requirement. The expansion brings conversational voice AI to everyone on the Grok app.

- [Announcement (X)](https://x.com/ebbyamir/status/1897118801231249818)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

## APIs & Platforms

### OpenAI — o1-pro API (Mar 20, 2025)

OpenAI exposed its o1-pro reasoning model through the API for the first time, priced at $600 per million output tokens. The show jokingly framed the pricing as 'for oligarchs', but it makes OpenAI's highest-compute reasoning tier programmatically accessible.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Nous Research — Portal (Mar 13, 2025)

Nous Research launched Portal, its new inference API service offering access to models like Hermes 3 Llama 70B and DeepHermes 3 8B directly via API. It marks another open-source lab standing up hosted API access to make its models more accessible.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025)

### OpenAI — Responses API + Web Search, File Search, Computer Use tools (Mar 13, 2025)

OpenAI announced a new agent-focused developer stack at a livestream: the Responses API, a new way to build with OpenAI designed for agentic workloads, plus an Agents SDK. It ships with three built-in tools: Web Search, a File Search tool providing built-in RAG over your files, and a Computer Use tool for agents that operate computer interfaces.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/OpenAIDevs/status/1899531225468969240)
- [Blog](https://t.co/s5Zsy4Wvqy)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI Turns Two! 🎉 Gemma 3, Gemini Native Image, new OpenAI tools, tons of open source & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-13-2025#sec-openai-s-new-api-and-tools)

### Mistral AI — Mistral OCR (Mar 6, 2025)

Mistral AI announced Mistral OCR, a document-understanding API the company claims is state of the art at extracting text, tables, and equations from complex documents. It targets RAG and document-processing pipelines with structured markdown output.

- [Blog](https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ocr)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

## Dev Tools

### MLX Community (Prince Canuma) — MLX-Audio v0.0.3 (Mar 27, 2025)

Prince Canuma, creator of MLX-VLM, FastMLX, and MLX Embeddings, released MLX-Audio v0.0.3, an open-source library bringing speech and audio models to Apple Silicon via MLX. It makes powerful open-source TTS and audio models accessible locally on Mac hardware.

- [GitHub repo](https://github.com/Blaizzy/mlx-audio)
- [Prince Canuma on X](https://x.com/Prince_Canuma/status/1903221389504430273)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-mlx-audio)

### Weights & Biases — Weave MCP Server (Mar 27, 2025)

Weights & Biases shipped an official MCP server for Weave, its LLM observability and evaluation tool, letting agents and MCP clients query and analyze your evals directly. Morgan McQuire of the W&B Applied AI team demoed it on the show, with wandb Models integration coming soon so agents can monitor loss curves for you.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/morgymcg/status/1904997037688385607)
- [GitHub repo](https://github.com/wandb/MCP-server)
- [Example W&B report](https://wandb.ai/wandb-applied-ai-team/mcp-tests/reports/Model-Evaluation-Analysis--VmlldzoxMjAxMDQ1NA?accessToken=o11lv1bo38pz2xay3x0dwwlb04lovkvcd4f9getbfboe2i7yl00htggxzaqapvcd)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-this-week-s-buzz-mcp-x-github)

### Google — Gemini Co-Drawing (Mar 20, 2025)

A Hugging Face space demo, Gemini Co-Drawing, uses Gemini's native image generation output to collaboratively complete and enhance your sketches as you draw. It showcases the new native image-output capability of Gemini 2.0 Flash in an interactive tool.

- [HF](https://huggingface.co/spaces/Trudy/gemini-codrawing)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

### Baidu — Miaoda (Mar 6, 2025)

Baidu introduced Miaoda, a no-code AI-powered build tool that lets users create applications without writing code. It joins the growing wave of AI-assisted app builders coming out of Chinese tech giants.

- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

### Cloudflare — MCP servers on Cloudflare Workers (Mar 6, 2025)

Cloudflare published tooling and docs for building and deploying Model Context Protocol servers on Cloudflare Workers, riding the MCP wave sweeping the AI community. Senior PM Dina Kozlov joined the show's MCP deep dive to walk through it alongside MCP builder Jason Kneen.

- [Cloudflare Blog](https://blog.cloudflare.com/model-context-protocol/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025#sec-introducing-mcp-model-context-protocol)

### Google — Data Science Agent in Colab (Mar 6, 2025)

Google launched a Data Science Agent inside Google Colab, powered by Gemini, that can autonomously generate complete, working notebooks from natural language descriptions of an analysis task. It automates data loading, exploration, and modeling boilerplate for data scientists.

- [Google Developers Blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/data-science-agent-in-colab-with-gemini/)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025)

## Papers & Research

### ByteDance — DAPO (Mar 20, 2025)

ByteDance published DAPO, a reinforcement learning method for LLM post-training presented as an improvement over GRPO. The paper ships with an open GitHub implementation, making the technique reproducible for the open-source RL community.

- [X thread](https://x.com/_philschmid/status/1902258522059866504)
- [Github](https://t.co/7MEc5mTlC8)
- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14476)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### ARC Prize Foundation — ARC-AGI 2 (Mar 27, 2025)

The ARC Prize Foundation revealed ARC-AGI 2, the next iteration of the abstract reasoning benchmark. Base LLMs score 0% and even thinking models only reach about 4%, showing how far current frontier models remain from human-level fluid intelligence.

**0%** base LLM score on ARC-AGI 2 · **4%** thinking model score on ARC-AGI 2

- [X announcement](https://x.com/arcprize/status/1905274808935608528)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Mar 27 - Gemini 2.5 Takes #1, OpenAI Goes Ghibli, DeepSeek V3 Roars, Qwen Omni, Wandb MCP & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-27-2025#sec-big-co-llms-apis)

### Roboflow — RF100-VL (Mar 20, 2025)

Alongside RF-DETR, Roboflow introduced RF100-VL, a new evaluation benchmark for vision-language models built from real-world detection datasets. It gives the community a grounded way to measure how well VLMs handle practical object detection tasks.

- [RF100-VL Benchmark](https://rf100-vl.org/)
- [RF-DETR Blog Post](https://blog.roboflow.com/rf-detr/#how-to-use-rf-detr)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 20 - OpenAIs new voices, Mistral Small, NVIDIA GTC recap & Nemotron, new SOTA vision from Roboflow & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-20-2025#sec-roboflow-s-new-model-and-benchmark)

## Acquisitions

### Weights & Biases — CoreWeave acquisition of Weights & Biases (Mar 6, 2025)

CoreWeave announced it is acquiring Weights & Biases, the AI developer platform and ThursdAI's home company. The deal pairs W&B's experiment tracking, Weave, and models tooling with CoreWeave's AI cloud infrastructure.

- [W&B Announcement](https://wandb.ai/wandb/wb-announcements/reports/W-B-being-acquired-by-CoreWeave--VmlldzoxMTY0MDI1MQ)
- Podcast coverage: [ThursdAI - Mar 6, 2025 - Alibaba's R1 Killer QwQ, Exclusive Google AI Mode Chat, and MCP fever sweeping the community!](https://thursdai.news/ep/mar-06-2025#sec-weights-biases-this-week-s-buzz)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in March 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-03), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-03 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in February 2025

> 22 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-02


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Anthropic — Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Feb 27, 2025)

Anthropic shipped its long-awaited model update, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which the crew called a coding BEAST with 'immaculate' vibes. It was one of the week's two huge model drops alongside GPT-4.5 and became an instant favorite for AI coding workflows like those discussed in the Windsurf interview.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-exciting-updates-from-entropic)

### Hume AI — Octave (Feb 27, 2025)

Hume AI released Octave, which it calls the first text-to-speech model that understands what it's saying, adjusting emotion, emphasis, and delivery based on the meaning of the text. It fits the episode's humanlike AI voices theme, letting users direct performances with natural-language acting instructions.

- [Blog](https://www.hume.ai/blog/octave-the-first-text-to-speech-model-that-understands-what-its-saying)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025)

### Inception Labs — Mercury (Feb 27, 2025)

Inception Labs announced Mercury, billed as the first commercial-scale diffusion large language model, generating text via diffusion rather than autoregressive decoding. The approach promises dramatically faster token throughput, demoed first with the Mercury Coder playground.

- [X](https://twitter.com/InceptionAILabs/status/1894847919624462794)
- [Try it](https://t.co/XCeNw9BtsX)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

### Microsoft — Phi-4-multimodal (Feb 27, 2025)

Microsoft expanded the Phi family with Phi-4-multimodal-instruct, a small open-weights model that handles text, vision, and audio in a single model, alongside a compact Phi-4-mini. The weights shipped on Hugging Face, continuing Microsoft's push for capable small models that can run on-device.

- [Blog](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/empowering-innovation-the-next-generation-of-the-phi-family/)
- [HuggingFace](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/Phi-4-multimodal-instruct)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

### OpenAI — GPT-4.5 (Feb 27, 2025)

OpenAI released GPT-4.5 as breaking news during the show, its first .5-scale jump in two years and reportedly around 10x the scale of the previous model, with speculation of 10+ trillion parameters. Sam Altman said it 'won't crush on benchmarks' against reasoning models, but early vibes praised its creative writing, vision, and medical diagnosis abilities, and it is expected to fuel future o-series reasoners trained on top of it.

- [X thread](https://x.com/karpathy/status/1895213020982472863)
- [creative writing](https://x.com/theo/status/1895206943293350123)
- [vision capability](https://x.com/emollick/status/1895211249656570258)
- [medical diagnosis](https://x.com/DeryaTR_/status/1895249875723321560)
- [LM Arena Result (X)](https://x.com/lmarena_ai/status/1896590146465579105)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-breaking-news-gpt-4-5-release)

### Arc Institute & NVIDIA — Evo 2 (Feb 20, 2025)

Arc Institute and NVIDIA introduced Evo 2, a state-of-the-art genomics model with around 40 billion parameters trained on 9.3 trillion nucleotides. It uses the StripedHyena architecture to process genetic sequences up to 1 million nucleotides, enabling prediction of genetic mutation effects and even design of entire genomes. Fully open: two papers, weights, data, and training and inference codebases.

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/pdhsu/status/1892243493445050606)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-genomics-and-video-models)

### Figure — Helix (Feb 20, 2025)

Humanoid robot company Figure announced Helix, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model with full upper-body control that runs entirely on the robot, pairing a 7 billion parameter VLM for understanding with an 80 million parameter transformer for control. The demo showed two robots collaborating and handing objects to each other from natural language commands, a first that Alex called 'super futuristically cool'.

- [Figure Helix announcement](https://www.figure.ai/news/helix)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-figure-robot-s-helix-announcement)

### Microsoft — MUSE (WHAM) (Feb 20, 2025)

Microsoft's MUSE can generate minutes of playable gameplay from just a single second of video frames and controller actions, preserving screen elements like health bars and percentages. It is based on the World and Human Action Model (WHAM) architecture, trained on a billion gameplay images from Xbox, with the model released on Hugging Face.

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/rowancheung/status/1892243245192683875)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/microsoft/wham)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-genomics-and-video-models)

### Microsoft — OmniParser v2 (Feb 20, 2025)

Microsoft released OmniParser v2, a better and faster screen-parsing model that converts UI screenshots into structured elements for GUI agents. It improves the computer-use agent stack and is available with a public Gradio demo.

- [Gradio Demo](https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/OmniParser-v2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025)

### Perplexity — R1-1776 (Feb 20, 2025)

Perplexity open-sourced R1-1776, a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek R1 designed to remove Chinese government censorship on topics like Tiananmen Square and Taiwanese independence. They used human experts to identify around 300 sensitive topics and built a censorship classifier to train the bias out, claiming no significant impact on standard eval performance. The name 1776 is a nod to American independence.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/perplexity-ai/r1-1776)
- [Blog post](https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/open-sourcing-r1-1776)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-open-source-llms-and-controversies)

### StepFun — Step-Video-T2V (Feb 20, 2025)

StepFun released Step-Video-T2V (plus a T2V Turbo variant), a 30 billion parameter state-of-the-art text-to-video model under an MIT license. Results impressed especially on text integration, such as rendering 'We will open source' on a scroll as a character unfurls it, marking one of the strongest open-source video drops of the week.

- [Paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10248)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/stepfun-ai/stepvideo-t2v)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Video-T2V)
- [Try it](https://yuewen.cn/videos)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-genomics-and-video-models)

### xAI — Grok 3 (Feb 20, 2025)

xAI dropped Grok 3 on Monday evening, claiming state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and a 1 million token context window, with heavy emphasis on agents and future reasoners. The launch was messy, with a bug serving Grok 2 to some users and an eval-methodology spat with OpenAI over best-of-N scores, but vibes shifted positive, with co-hosts calling the base model the best coding model out. It is free for now, 'until their GPUs melt', with no API yet for independent evaluation.

- [xAI blog](https://x.ai/blog/grok-3)
- [Try it](http://grok.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-grok-3-evaluation-and-user-experiences)

## Products & Apps

### Microsoft — Majorana 1 (Feb 20, 2025)

Microsoft announced the Majorana 1 quantum chip alongside a claimed new state of matter called topological superconductivity, carving a new path for quantum computing. Alex called the announcement 'absolutely mind blowing' as a potential big deal for the future of computing.

- [Microsoft blog](https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/microsofts-majorana-1-chip-carves-new-path-for-quantum-computing/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025)

## Major Features & Updates

### xAI — Grok Voice Mode (Feb 27, 2025)

A week after launching Grok 3 without voice, xAI released Grok's voice mode, including an 'unhinged' personality option that the panel demoed live. It marks xAI's entry into real-time conversational voice AI alongside OpenAI's advanced voice mode.

- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-grok-s-unhinged-voice-mode-a-new-experience)

### xAI — DeepSearch (Feb 20, 2025)

Alongside Grok 3, xAI launched DeepSearch, an agentic deep-research feature comparable to Perplexity or OpenAI's Deep Research, with a leg up on real-time information thanks to native access to X search. Alex's initial tests were underwhelming, nicknaming it 'Shallow Search' after it spent 34 seconds on a query where OpenAI's Deep Research took 11 minutes and cited 17 sources.

- [xAI blog](https://x.ai/blog/grok-3)
- [Try it](http://grok.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-grok-3-evaluation-and-user-experiences)

## APIs & Platforms

### Google DeepMind — Veo 2 (via FAL API) (Feb 27, 2025)

Google DeepMind's Veo 2 video generation model became accessible to developers through FAL's inference API. This was the first broadly available API access to Veo 2, letting builders generate high-quality video from text prompts without waiting on Google's own product surfaces.

- [FAL](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/veo2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025)

## Dev Tools

### DeepSeek — Open Source Week infra releases (Feb 27, 2025)

DeepSeek ran its Open Source Week, releasing a series of production infrastructure repos (including FlashMLA, DeepEP, and DeepGEMM) that power its training and inference stack. The drops gave the open-source community a rare look at the low-level kernels and communication libraries behind DeepSeek's efficient frontier models.

- [X account](https://x.com/deepseek_ai/status/1894931931554558199)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 Feb 27, 2025 - GPT-4.5 Drops TODAY?!, Claude 3.7 Coding BEAST, Grok's Unhinged Voice, Humanlike AI voices & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-27-2025#sec-open-source-ai-highlights)

### Haize Labs — Verdict (Feb 20, 2025)

Haize Labs released Verdict, an open-source framework for composing LLM judges that tackles core LLM-as-a-judge problems: self-preference bias, prompt sensitivity, and meta-evaluation. Verdict combines simpler judging primitives into more robust and efficient evaluators ('judge-time compute scaling'), achieving near state-of-the-art results on benchmarks like ExpertQA at a fraction of the cost, fast enough to use as a real-time guardrail. Co-founders Leonard Tang and Nimit joined the show to discuss it.

- [Whitepaper](https://verdict.haizelabs.com/whitepaper.pdf)
- [GitHub](http://github.com/haizelabs/verdict)
- [Thread on X](https://x.com/leonardtang_/thread/1892243653071908949)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-interview-with-hayes-labs)

### Hao AI Lab — FastVideo (Feb 20, 2025)

Hao AI Lab released FastVideo, a method that makes HunyuanVideo (HY-Video) three times faster with no additional training, using a technique called Sliding Tile Attention that outperforms even flash attention for this workload. Faster inference makes open-source video models far more practical, and it supports HY-Video LoRAs for fine-tuned applications.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/FastVideo)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-genomics-and-video-models)

## Papers & Research

### Weights & Biases — Agents Whitepaper & Course (Feb 20, 2025)

Weights & Biases released a whitepaper on evaluating AI agent applications and announced an upcoming agents course built in collaboration with OpenAI's Ilan Biggio, with signups at wandb.me/agents. The push targets agent evaluation and observability tooling for the community.

- [Whitepaper](https://wandb.ai/site/resources/whitepapers/evaluating-ai-agent-applications?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=weave)
- [Agents course signup](http://wandb.me/agents)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### University of Cambridge researchers — ZeroBench (Feb 20, 2025)

A new benchmark called ZeroBench launched, claiming to be the impossible benchmark for vision-language models: all current top-of-the-line VLMs score zero on it. Tasks include visually demanding puzzles like reading a question written in the shape of a star hidden among scattered letters, highlighting how far VLMs still are from true visual understanding.

- [Announcement on X](https://x.com/JRobertsAI/status/1891506671056261413)
- [Project page](https://t.co/E4noN7yDDM)
- [Paper](https://t.co/n5GAwFiGEV)
- [Hugging Face](https://t.co/mD8Eptr9M5)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-open-source-llms-and-controversies)

## Also Released

### Hugging Face — Ultra Scale Playbook (Feb 20, 2025)

Hugging Face released the Ultra Scale Playbook, a guide to building and scaling AI models on large GPU clusters. The team ran 4,000 scaling experiments on up to 512 GPUs to distill practical guidance for labs training big models.

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/spaces/nanotron/ultrascale-playbook)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Feb 20 - Live from AI Eng in NY - Grok 3, Unified Reasoners, Anthropic's Bombshell, and Robot Handoffs!](https://thursdai.news/ep/feb-20-2025#sec-open-source-llms-and-controversies)

---
**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in February 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-02), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-02 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack


# Everything AI Released in January 2025

> 27 AI releases tracked on ThursdAI (https://thursdai.news), the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — all covered live on the show. Canonical page: https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-01


**About this source**: ThursdAI is the weekly AI news show that has covered every major AI release live since early 2023 — 200+ episodes and 800+ releases tracked, each with primary sources, key numbers, and episode analysis from the hosts and guest experts (researchers and founders from the labs shipping this list). Major releases regularly go public mid-show, so coverage often includes day-zero reactions you won't find in retrospectives. Per-company timelines: https://thursdai.news/companies · per-topic: https://thursdai.news/topics · weekly recap: https://thursdai.news/this-week

## New Models

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen2.5-Max (Jan 30, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen2.5-Max, a large MoE flagship model available through the Qwen Chat interface and API, claiming competitive results against DeepSeek V3 and other frontier models. The chat app also quietly shipped a video generation capability powered by Alibaba's Tongyi Wanxiang.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/1884263157574820053)
- [Try it (Qwen Chat)](https://chat.qwenlm.ai/)
- [Tongyi Wanxiang](https://tongyi.aliyun.com/wanxiang/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025)

### Alibaba (Qwen) — Qwen2.5-VL (Jan 30, 2025)

Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen2.5-VL, open-weights vision-language models up to 72B that handle images, documents, video understanding, and on-screen agentic grounding. The 72B Instruct model was immediately available on Hugging Face and in Qwen Chat.

**72B** Largest variant

- [Project blog](https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2.5-vl/)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-72B-Instruct)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2.5-VL)
- [Try it (Qwen Chat)](https://chat.qwenlm.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025)

### Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) — Tulu 3 405B (Jan 30, 2025)

The Allen Institute for AI scaled its fully open Tulu 3 post-training recipe to a 405B-parameter model based on Llama 3.1 405B. It demonstrates that Ai2's open RLVR post-training pipeline works at frontier scale, with weights and recipe released openly.

**405B** Parameters

- [Blog](https://allenai.org/blog/tulu-3-405B)
- [Hugging Face collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/allenai/tulu-3-models-673b8e0dc3512e30e7dc54f5)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-open-source-ai-developments)

### DeepSeek — Janus Pro (Jan 30, 2025)

Amid the R1 frenzy, DeepSeek also released Janus Pro, unified multimodal models at 1.5B and 7B parameters that handle both image understanding and image generation. The open release added to DeepSeek's week of dominating AI news headlines.

**1.5B / 7B** Model sizes

- [GitHub](https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Janus/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file)
- [Try it (HF Space)](https://huggingface.co/spaces/AP123/Janus-Pro-7b)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-deepseek-hype-and-analysis)

### M-A-P (Multimodal Art Projection) — YuE 7B (Jan 30, 2025)

The Multimodal Art Projection (M-A-P) team released YuE, a 7B open-source music generation model dubbed the 'open Suno' on the show, capable of generating full songs with vocals from lyrics. Weights are on Hugging Face with code on GitHub and a hosted demo on fal.ai.

**7B** Parameters

- [Demo (fal.ai)](https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/yue/requests)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/m-a-p)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/multimodal-art-projection/YuE)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-voice-and-audio-innovations)

### Mistral AI — Mistral Small 2501 (Jan 30, 2025)

Mistral AI released Mistral Small 2501, a 24B-parameter instruct model under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. Announced as breaking news during the show, it continues Mistral's tradition of strong small open models suitable for fine-tuning and local deployment.

**24B** Parameters

- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-mistral-ai-s-new-model)

### NVIDIA — Eagle 2 (Jan 30, 2025)

NVIDIA published Eagle 2, a family of open vision-language models with an accompanying paper, model weights on Hugging Face, and a live demo. It is a fully transparent VLM release covering training data strategy and recipes, competitive with much larger vision models.

- [Paper](http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14818)
- [Models (HF collection)](https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/eagle-2-6764ba887fa1ef387f7df067)
- [Demo](https://eagle-vlm.xyz/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025)

### ByteDance — UI-TARS (Jan 23, 2025)

ByteDance released UI-TARS, open computer-use models in 7B and 72B parameter sizes that can control a Mac or PC, with desktop apps for both platforms. ByteDance claims they beat GPT-4-class models on GUI/computer-control benchmarks.

**7B / 72B** Model sizes

- [UI-TARS-7B-SFT on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/bytedance-research/UI-TARS-7B-SFT)
- [UI-TARS desktop on GitHub](https://github.com/bytedance/UI-TARS-desktop)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025#sec-bytedance-s-uitars-and-other-open-source-news)

### DeepSeek — DeepSeek R1 (Jan 23, 2025)

DeepSeek released R1, a state-of-the-art open source reasoning model under a permissive MIT license. It matches or beats OpenAI's o1 on key reasoning benchmarks while being fully open weights, and DeepSeek also shipped a family of distilled smaller models. The show called this the hottest week open source AI has ever had.

- [DeepSeek on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai)
- [Combine DeepSeek R1 reasoning with GPT-3.5 Turbo (egghead)](https://egghead.io/combine-deep-seek-r1-reasoning-with-gpt-3-5-turbo-for-the-cheapest-fastest-and-best-ai~24oy1)
- [Run DeepSeek with more thinking (Gist)](https://gist.github.com/vgel/8a2497dc45b1ded33287fa7bb6cc1adc)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025#sec-open-source-ai-deepseek-r1)

### Google DeepMind — Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking 01-21 (Jan 23, 2025)

Google released an updated Gemini Flash Thinking model (01-21) with a 1 million token context window, built-in code execution, and improved evals over the previous Thinking release. It pushes Google's reasoning-model line forward in the same week DeepSeek R1 landed.

**1M** Context window (tokens)

- [Noam Shazeer announcement on X](https://x.com/NoamShazeer/status/1881845900659896773)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

### Hugging Face — SmolVLM (256M) (Jan 23, 2025)

Hugging Face released SmolVLM, a family of tiny vision-language models including a 256M-parameter version small enough to run entirely in the browser via WebGPU. It demonstrates how far efficient multimodal models have shrunk while remaining usable.

**256M** Parameters (smallest VLM)

- [SmolVLM-256M WebGPU demo on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM-256M-Instruct-WebGPU)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

### Tencent — Hunyuan3D 2.0 (Jan 23, 2025)

Tencent released Hunyuan3D 2.0, a state-of-the-art open source 3D asset generation model on Hugging Face. It produces high-quality 3D shapes and textures and pushes open weights forward in the 3D generation category.

- [Hunyuan3D-2 on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/tencent/Hunyuan3D-2)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

## Products & Apps

### Riffusion — Fuzz (Jan 30, 2025)

Riffusion (written as 'Refusion' in the show notes) launched Fuzz, a hosted AI music generation product that is free to use during its initial period. It was highlighted in the voice and audio segment alongside YuE as part of a wave of new AI music tools.

- [Fuzz (free for now)](https://refusion.ai/fuzz)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-voice-and-audio-innovations)

### OpenAI — Operator (Jan 23, 2025)

OpenAI launched Operator, an agentic browser-use product that performs tasks for you on the web, available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers at operator.chatgpt.com. As Sam Altman framed it on the launch stream: you give agents a task and they go off and do it.

- [operator.chatgpt.com](https://operator.chatgpt.com)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025#sec-introducing-operator-ai-agents-in-action)

## Major Features & Updates

### Exa — Exa DeepSeek Chat (Jan 30, 2025)

Exa integrated DeepSeek R1 into a free hosted chat demo that combines the reasoning model with Exa's web search. Mentioned in the tools section as a no-cost way to try R1 grounded with live search results.

- [Demo](https://demo.exa.ai/deepseekchat)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025)

### Perplexity — Perplexity Pro with R1 (Jan 30, 2025)

Perplexity integrated DeepSeek R1 into its Pro search product, letting subscribers choose R1 as the reasoning model behind answers. It was one of several tools that raced to host R1 on Western infrastructure within days of the model's release.

- [Perplexity](https://perplexity.ai)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025)

## APIs & Platforms

### Anthropic — Citations (Claude API) (Jan 23, 2025)

Anthropic launched a Citations capability in the Claude API, letting Claude ground its answers in provided source documents and return precise citations. It targets RAG and document-QA use cases where verifiable sourcing matters.

- [Anthropic Citations docs](https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/citations)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

### Perplexity — Sonar Pro Search API (Jan 23, 2025)

Perplexity released its Sonar Pro search-grounded API, giving developers programmatic access to Perplexity-style web-grounded answers, and also launched an AI assistant for Android. Two shipping moves that push Perplexity beyond its consumer answer engine.

- [Perplexity announcement on X](https://x.com/perplexity_ai/status/1882466239123255686)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

## Dev Tools

### Block — Goose (Jan 30, 2025)

Block (the company behind Square) released Goose, an open-source local agent framework that runs on your machine and can use any LLM to execute tasks with tools. It was a centerpiece of the show's agents discussion as an open alternative for building autonomous workflows locally.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/blocks/status/1884292904753254488)
- [GitHub / docs](https://block.github.io/goose/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-exploring-open-source-agents-goose-and-operator)

### Browser Use — Browser-use (Jan 30, 2025)

Browser-use is an open-source library that lets LLM agents control a real web browser, positioned on the show as the OSS counterpart to OpenAI's Operator. It enables anyone to build browsing agents with their model of choice instead of a closed hosted product.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-exploring-open-source-agents-goose-and-operator)

### ByteDance — Trae (Jan 23, 2025)

ByteDance launched Trae, an AI-powered code editor positioned as a Cursor competitor. It is ByteDance's second shipping move of the week alongside the UI-TARS computer-use models.

- [Trae AI](https://trae.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

### Pietro Schirano — RAT (Retrieval Augmented Thinking) (Jan 23, 2025)

Guest Pietro Schirano released RAT (Retrieval Augmented Thinking), a technique and tool that extracts DeepSeek R1's reasoning traces and feeds them to a cheaper, faster model like GPT-3.5 Turbo for the final answer. It showcases the new pattern of mixing open reasoning traces with closed completion models.

- [RAT announcement on X](https://x.com/skirano/status/1881854481304047656)
- [Combine DeepSeek R1 reasoning with GPT-3.5 Turbo (egghead)](https://egghead.io/combine-deep-seek-r1-reasoning-with-gpt-3-5-turbo-for-the-cheapest-fastest-and-best-ai~24oy1)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

## Papers & Research

### UC Berkeley — TinyZero & RAGEN (Jan 30, 2025)

Berkeley researchers released TinyZero and RAGEN, open replications of DeepSeek's R1-Zero reinforcement-learning recipe on small models. The projects showed that R1-style emergent reasoning behavior can be reproduced cheaply, with training runs logged publicly on Weights & Biases.

- [GitHub](https://app.reflect.app/g/altryne/github.com/Jiayi-Pan/TinyZero)
- [W&B logs](https://app.reflect.app/g/altryne/wandb.ai/jiayipan/TinyZero)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-open-source-ai-developments)

## Datasets

### Open Thoughts — OpenThoughts-114k (Jan 30, 2025)

An open reasoning dataset with 114k examples released by the Open Thoughts project to fuel open replication of reasoning models like DeepSeek R1. It gives the open-source community high-quality chain-of-thought training data for distilling and fine-tuning reasoning LLMs.

- [X announcement](https://x.com/madiator/status/1884284103354376283)
- [Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-thoughts/OpenThoughts-114k)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 30 - DeepSeek vs. Nasdaq, R1 everywhere, Qwen Max & Video, Open Source SUNO, Goose agents & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-30-2025#sec-open-source-ai-developments)

## Benchmarks & Evals

### Center for AI Safety & Scale AI — Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) (Jan 23, 2025)

Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) launched as a new, very hard benchmark designed to stay unsaturated as models max out MMLU and math evals. It crowdsourced expert-level questions to measure frontier model capability where existing benchmarks are at 98-99% saturation.

- [Humanity's Last Exam website](https://lastexam.ai/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025#sec-humanity-s-last-exam-benchmark)

## Funding

### OpenAI (with SoftBank & Oracle) — Stargate Project (Jan 23, 2025)

OpenAI, SoftBank (Masayoshi Son's Vision Fund), and Oracle (Larry Ellison) announced the Stargate Project, a planned $500 billion investment in US AI infrastructure. The announcement, made alongside the White House, was framed on the show as an AI 'Manhattan Project'-scale buildout of datacenters and compute.

**$500B** Planned investment

- [OpenAI: Announcing the Stargate Project](https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025#sec-major-ai-investments-and-updates)

## Also Released

### Weights & Biases — W&B SWE-bench Verified SOTA agent (Jan 23, 2025)

Weights & Biases announced a state-of-the-art AI programming agent built with OpenAI's o1 that broke the SOTA score on SWE-bench Verified. The work was developed and tracked with W&B Weave, the team's LLM observability toolkit.

- [W&B SOTA programming agent report](https://wandb.ai/wandb/agents/reports/Creating-a-state-of-the-art-AI-programming-agent-with-OpenAI-s-o1--VmlldzoxMTAyODI2Ng?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Jan9)
- [W&B Weave](https://wandb.ai/site/weave?utm_source=thursdai&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=jan23)
- Podcast coverage: [📆 ThursdAI - Jan 23, 2025 - 🔥 DeepSeek R1 is HERE, OpenAI Operator Agent, $500B AI manhattan project, ByteDance UI-Tars, new Gemini Thinker & more AI news](https://thursdai.news/ep/jan-23-2025)

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**Cite as**: ThursdAI — Everything AI Released in January 2025 (https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-01), the weekly AI news podcast and release tracker by Alex Volkov.
Source: ThursdAI — https://thursdai.news/releases/2025-01 · All months: https://thursdai.news/releases · Subscribe: https://thursdai.news/substack