MiniMax releases M2.5, a frontier AI model at a fraction of rival costs

Chinese AI startup MiniMax has released M2.5, a new large language model that the company says competes with top-tier models from Anthropic and Google while costing significantly less to run. MiniMax offers two versions through its API. M2.5-Lightning runs at 100 tokens per second and costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $2.40 per million …

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Alibaba releases Qwen3.5, a multimodal AI model with 397 billion parameters

Alibaba has launched Qwen3.5, a new artificial intelligence model designed to function as a multimodal agent capable of processing text, images, and video. The QwenTeam announces this development on the company’s website. The model contains 397 billion parameters but activates only 17 billion per task, which the team says optimizes both speed and cost. This …

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Mistral releases Voxtral Transcribe 2: transcribe on your phone for pennies

Mistral AI has released Voxtral Transcribe 2, a family of speech-to-text models designed for both batch processing and real-time transcription. The company positions the technology as more accurate and significantly cheaper than competing services while enabling on-device processing for sensitive data. The release includes two models. Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 handles pre-recorded audio files at …

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OpenClaw: This AI assistant can teach itself new skills and control your entire digital life

An open-source AI assistant called OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot) demonstrates how future digital helpers might operate entirely on users’ own computers while offering unprecedented customization and control. Federico Viticci writes on MacStories that the project allows users to interact with powerful language models through familiar messaging apps like Telegram or iMessage. The assistant runs …

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Black Forest Labs: New AI models generate high quality images in less than a second

Black Forest Labs has introduced a new series of AI image generators called FLUX.2 [klein]. This model family focuses on high speed and low hardware requirements. The company states that these models unify image generation and editing within a single architecture. According to the announcement, the systems produce images in less than one second on …

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New open source challenger takes on Google in the AI image race

The open source community has a powerful new tool for high precision image generation. GLM Image, a model from the startup Z.ai, demonstrates superior accuracy in rendering complex text compared to Google’s Nano Banana Pro. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that this new model excels at creating information dense visuals such as infographics and technical …

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OpenAI and Google update translation technology

OpenAI and Google have introduced new tools and models to advance artificial intelligence translation. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Translate, a standalone tool designed to compete with established services. It supports over 50 languages and uses a layout similar to existing translation platforms. Features of ChatGPT Translate A primary feature of ChatGPT Translate is its integration with …

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Qwen-Image-2512: High quality AI images go open source to challenge Google dominance

Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2512. This update improves their foundation model for generating images from text. The model is now available for public use and enterprise integration. According to the developers, this version focuses on three main areas: human realism, natural detail, and text rendering. The model aims to reduce the artificial appearance often …

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This tiny AI model outperforms Google’s Gemini at understanding videos

The Allen Institute for AI has released Molmo 2, an open-source video model designed to compete with larger proprietary systems in video understanding and analysis. The launch aims to demonstrate that smaller models can serve as practical alternatives for businesses. Emilia David reports for VentureBeat. Ai2 released three versions of Molmo 2: an 8B model …

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These AI chatbots are frozen in time and don’t know World War I happened

Researchers at the University of Zurich and Cologne University are creating large language models trained solely on historical documents up to specific dates. The team, led by Daniel Göttlich, Dominik Loibner, Guohui Jiang, and Hans-Joachim Voth, describes their project on GitHub. The models, called Ranke-4B, contain four billion parameters and are trained on 80 billion …

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