🚨 OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Astra — and this feels like more than just another model upgrade.
Astra is built not only to answer questions, but to actually do work: coding, browsing, research, documents, and complex multi-step tasks.
Some standout numbers: 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 97.6% on FrontierMath Tier 4, 100% on ExploitBench, a 1.05M-token context window, and up to 128K output tokens.
It’s also OpenAI’s first model to reach Critical cyber capability, meaning it can potentially discover and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities with the right tools.
The bigger story is the shift itself: AI is moving from “smart assistant” to something you can increasingly delegate entire workflows to.

So, how are the modelers doing with the new horsepower?

Or rather, with the new Astra.

Blender MCP + Astra + a bit of Computer Use: feed it a sketch of a steam locomotive, and a few minutes later you get 3,295 objects.

https://x.com/tomkrcha/status/2095756085890310311

I think that’s it… we’re done.

Viggle is back with an open model — Viggle-Animate — and it’s pretty damn capable.

For the first time, they’re releasing weights + code.

It replaces characters in video using MiniMax H3. Take a video, grab one frame, manually redraw the character as anything you want, and the model propagates that replacement through the entire clip while preserving motion, camera, and timing.

No pose skeleton, segmentation, face tracking, depth, or text prompt. Just the video + one modified frame.

Under the hood: a 33.1B MiniMax H3 ref2va fine-tune + DMD2 LoRA. Distillation brings it down to 4 sampling steps.

It’s 6× faster than Wan2.2-Animate-14B.

The catch: hardware. BF16 needs ~62 GiB for the transformer and peaks at ~80.1 GiB VRAM. They recommend 96 GB+ or CPU offload. It reportedly runs on a 32 GB RTX 5090 via NVFP4, but that quant isn’t public yet.
Also, you can’t use a normal character portrait. The reference has to be a frame from the original video, already redrawn as the target character.
https://viggle.ai/h3

New iPhone 18 Pro is finally here. Bigger battery, A20 Pro, vapor chamber, 48MP camera, and finally Siri might actually be GOOD.

That cherry color though… are you getting it?

FLUX.3 Video Edit model

It can take an existing video and, based on a prompt, change objects, characters, backgrounds, materials, text, effects, and even events within the scene. You can also change dialogue and translate conversations with lip sync.

The biggest bombshell: $0.03 per second. Dirt cheap!

So:

5 sec — $0.15
10 sec — $0.30
15 sec — $0.45

But.

It currently works with clips up to 15 seconds, and input videos above 720p are downscaled before processing. No masks, additional references, or resolution selection yet.

In short:

max. 15 sec
max. 50 MiB
up to 720p in the edit pipeline
24 fps
no seed control
apparently no output resolution or duration control (need to dig into this)
no masks
no additional reference images
no video-only motion/style reference
not an extension model — continuing a clip requires FLUX 3 Video Continuation

You can run the result through FLUX Video Upscale separately, up to 4K — but that’s extra $$$.

Google just dropped Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking.

Gemini 3.8 Live is fast voice-to-voice, understands video/images almost in real time, and automatically switches between 97 languages.
(Siri still has ONE.)

It can call tools and APIs in the background without interrupting the conversation.

Extended Thinking is the version for complex tasks: it can reason and speak simultaneously, handle multi-step processes, and verbally comment on its progress.

There’s a Gemini API and AI Studio.
Extended Thinking is also coming to Gemini Live, Docs, Gmail, and Keep.

API pricing is the same for 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking:

Input audio — $0.005/min
Output audio — $0.018/min
Video/image input — around $0.002/min
Text — $0.75 per 1M input tokens and $4.50 per 1M output tokens, including thinking tokens.

Google wants to turn Gemini Live from a “voice chat” into a full-fledged realtime agent that can see, think, talk, and do things in parallel through tools.

Buttery-smooth 120 FPS Three.js arena action, running entirely in your browser. Meet Arena Shooter.

4.6 BILLION Astra tokens burned.

20+ vehicles to capture, zombies, day/night combat, 20+ upgrades & perks, and LLM bots trying to destroy you.

No signup. No install. Just open and fight.

Try https://vortex.channel/vr/soloplay/

Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Sol & Luna — same day!

Anthropic dropped Opus 5.5, while OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and Luna.

Opus 5.5: $4 / $20, AA Index 58 (#1), Terminal-Bench 66.4%, GDPval-AA 1846 Elo. Anthropic also promises less “Claude-style” fluff.

Sol: $2 / $10, 1.05M context, AA 48. DeepSWE: 68.8% at $2.74/task.
Luna: $0.10 / $0.50, AA 37. DeepSWE: 66.6% at just $0.22/task — almost the same score as Sol for 12x less.

The catch with Opus: tokens are 20% cheaper, but usage is much higher — 119K tokens/task vs 73K for Opus 5 and 31K for Sol. CodeRabbit saw 40–60% more tokens on code reviews.

On AA, Opus 5.5 medium vs Sol max: coding 52.5% vs 43.9%, documents +159 Elo for Opus, business processes roughly tied. Cost: $1.34 vs $1.06/task.

Bottom line: Opus 5.5 is currently the smartest model and 2.5x cheaper than Fable. Luna is the big story for high-volume classification and extraction: 10x cheaper than Haiku. Sol is the mid-range option for mass workloads. Sonnet 5.5 reportedly arrives in a couple of weeks.

Runway has released a plugin for DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, and After Effects.

It lets you generate, extend, and upscale videos and images directly on the timeline. Video editing, including HDR upgrades, is also available and is powered by Aleph 2.

Available video models: Runway Gen-4.5, Veo 3.1, Seedance 2.5, and Kling 3.0 Pro.

For images: Gen-4 Image, Nano Banana, and GPT Image 2.

The plugin is available on Windows and macOS. For Linux, ask Claude.