Happy Sunday, friends!
Welcome back to the weekly AI news roundup.
In case you’d missed it, here’s this week’s Thursday post:
If you’re consistently missing out on my emails, remember to check your “Promotions” tab and mark whytryai@substack.com as a “Safe Sender.”
Here’s what happened in AI over the past two weeks:
👩💻 AI releases
Alibaba news:
Qwen3.8-Max is a powerful multimodal model built for long, autonomous coding and professional tasks, with visual feedback and self-correction.
QwenWork is an all-in-one work platform that handles tasks across cloud, desktop, and enterprise tools using AI agents.
Wan3.0 can turn any input, including documents, slides, spreadsheets, and web pages into 30-second continuous videos.
Autodesk launched 3D Editor + Canvas in Flow Studio that let creators build and refine editable 3D scenes using image and video models right in the app.
Black Forest Labs released FLUX 3 Video, which can generate 20-second HD clips with native audio and lip-synced dialogue in multiple languages.
ByteDance launched Seedance 2.5, a video model that generates continuous 30-second clips in a single pass and can handle up to 50 reference inputs.
Genspark open-sourced GenOffice, a free office suite for Mac, Windows, and Linux that works with docs, sheets, slides, etc., and comes with a built-in AI agent.
Google news:
Ask Maps can now find hotels, order food, and get real-time traffic info using a personal agent that connects to your Gmail and Calendar.
Gemini Spark now integrates with Chrome and can automate web tasks like booking appointments, comparing products, and filling forms.
HeyGen launched a Video Podcast tool that turns documents and links into two-host video shows with B-roll footage, captions, and more.
Ideogram launched Object Remover, which can erase selected items, logos, people, and text from images while preserving lighting and reflections.
Meta launched Muse Code, a coding agent that can handle complex software engineering tasks, powered by the new Muse Spark 1.2 model.
MiniMax open-sourced H3, an omnimodal video model that generates 15-second 2K clips with native audio from any mix of images, text, and video inputs.
OpenAI news:
Education Plugins give educators and students bundled workflows to help with guided tutoring and lesson planning inside ChatGPT Work and Codex.
GPT-5.6 Sol got a major accuracy upgrade (68% fewer factual errors) and a new reasoning slider for paid users.
Perplexity news:
Personal Computer has rolled out to Windows, where it can complete multi-step tasks and control apps and files on your desktop.
Projects (formerly Spaces) are shared hubs with persistent files and memory so teams and agents can carry context across tasks.
Replit launched Replit Design, a free creative suite that lets anyone generate and refine graphics, mockups, visual assets, and more using multiple AI models.
xAI news:
Grok Build Mode lets you create apps, dashboards, games, and websites via chat, then publish them to a live URL. (SuperGrok Heavy users only for now.)
Grok Voice Think Fast 2.0 is a fast speech-to-speech model with sub-second latency for more natural voice conversations.
Imagine Video 1.5 now supports image and voice references, so you can generate consistent characters across scenes.
🔬 AI research
Hark previewed Hark Handoff, a browser agent that can shop, file returns, make reservations, and do research across the web, even without official APIs.
OpenAI teased Astra, an upcoming AI model that helped solve or make major progress on 10 long-standing problems in math and theoretical computer science.
Spotify signed a licensing deal with Merlin to add independent labels to its upcoming AI remix and covers tool for Premium subscribers.
📖 AI resources
“AI is getting a little out of control” [VIDEO]: A thorough look at the recent rollercoaster developments by AI Explained.
🔀 AI random
Anthropic and Meta both reported their AI agents escaping test sandboxes and breaching real companies during safety evaluations. (Just like OpenAI earlier.)
Google pulled its AI image-editing tool from Google Earth after just one day, when researchers showed it could generate fake satellite imagery.
🤦♂️ AI fail of the week
I didn’t think one could get second-hand cringe from freestyle robo comebacks, but…