The latest AI news, in focus.

Laser Light Cannon - a review

A laser scientist reviews the laser light cannon from the Steven Universe cartoon, including its highly unusual beam shape.

Apollo’s chief economist says AI delivers “zero financial return” to U.S. companies outside the tech industry.

Thorsten Sløk, Chief Economist at Apollo Global Management, analyzed the S&P 493 (the S&P 500 excluding seven tech giants) and found that non-tech firms’ profit margins are on par with per-capita revenue, with no evidence that AI has boosted productivity. He noted that AI lacks an understanding of key business factors such as accountability, trust, and corporate culture, and therefore has yet to deliver financial returns.

Why it mattersThis view is based on empirical observations of the mainstream listed‑company universe (S&P 493), citing specific data ranges and limitations (excluding seven technology firms such as Alphabet and Amazon), and aligns with the findings of several recent studies, offering a verifiable analytical framework with clearly defined attribution boundaries.

Canva has launched its in-house AI image-generation model, Canva Craft, which employs a two-stage design and planning architecture.

Canva has launched its first in-house AI image-generation model, Canva Craft, which employs a two-stage architecture—planning followed by generation—to enhance design accuracy, consistency, and controllability. It supports 2K resolution and over 30 aspect ratios, catering to use cases such as social media, marketing content, and digital art.

Canva has launched its first in-house image-generation model, Canva Craft, which is now available to all users.

Canva has officially launched its first in-house image-generation model, Canva Craft, which employs a two-stage generative architecture, supports 2K resolution and output in 30 aspect ratios, and emphasizes text readability and layer editability. The model was trained on millions of human-designed templates within the platform and has already been integrated into Dream Lab and the API; going forward, it will be accessible via MCP to third-party chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Amazon SageMaker launches the Kokoro-82M TTS model, supporting low-latency streaming speech synthesis for AI voice agents.

AWS has released a technical solution that leverages the Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model hosted on SageMaker, using bidirectional WebSocket to enable AI agents to generate text and synthesize speech simultaneously, significantly reducing end-to-end speech response latency. The solution offers two audio back‑transmission methods—Base64‑SSE and unified binary transmission—and is explicitly labeled as “proof-of-value,” meaning it has not yet reached production‑ready status.

Amazon SageMaker TTS service enables metric-driven auto-scaling: taking the Kokoro-82M model as an example.

The AWS blog introduces an empirical, automated scaling method for deploying text-to-speech (TTS) models on SageMaker real-time endpoints, eliminating guesswork and basing the approach on two measured metrics—Q_max (the maximum sustainable concurrent requests per instance) and T_total (the time required for planned scaling)—to create a reproducible, verifiable scaling strategy.

IBM releases the Granite Speech 5.0 series of speech models: supporting multilingual transcription, translation, and speaker attribution.

IBM has released three open-source speech models in the Granite Speech 5.0 series—granite-speech-5.0-2b (high-precision multilingual ASR/MT), granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc (ultra-fast edge-side multilingual transcription), and the updated granite-speech-4.1-2b-plus (enhanced multi-speaker conversational modeling)—all licensed under Apache 2.0 and compatible with mainstream inference frameworks.

Mistral releases the Voxtral 3 voice agent SDK: supports real-time voice interaction in over 50 languages and emotional TTS.

Mistral will launch Voxtral 3 by October 26, 2026—a family of end-to-end SDKs and models for multilingual real-time voice interaction, covering three major modules: ASR (including speaker separation), the inference layer, and TTS. The solution emphasizes data sovereignty and modular deployment, though all performance claims are based on the vendor’s internal testing and have not been independently verified by a third party.

YouTube Music launches generative AI music tags: labeling as “AI-created” instead of banning it

Starting in October 2026, YouTube Music will gradually roll out generative AI music content labeling worldwide, continuing the practice already in place on the main YouTube platform for AI-generated videos. This measure does not entail removing or restricting content; rather, it responds to users’ demand for greater transparency regarding the origins of creative works.

Automating coherent long-form video generation

Generative AI

Generate incredible images with Google's Imagen 4

Google's flagship image generation model, Imagen 4, is now available for you to try on Replicate. Create images with fine detail, versatile styles, and improved typography.

NVIDIA H100 GPUs are here

NVIDIA H100 GPUs are here, with better performance and lower cost.

Run 30,000+ LoRAs on Hugging Face with Replicate

We've partnered with Hugging Face to bring Replicate inference to their platform.

Run MiniMax Speech-02 models with an API

MiniMax's Speech-02 models give you high-quality text-to-speech with voice cloning, emotional expression, and multilingual support.

Easel AI is now on Replicate

Advanced face swap and AI avatars from Easel AI are now on Replicate.

Stylized video with Wan2.1

One of the most fun ways to use Wan2.1 is video style transfer. Learn how here.

Creative roundup: avatars, lightsabers, and LoRA tricks

We take a quick look at the latest creative models, experiments, and community projects.

Wan2.1: generate videos with an API

Wan2.1 is the most capable open-source video generation model, producing coherent and high-quality outputs. Learn how to run it in the cloud with a single line of code.

Wan2.1 parameter sweep

We've been playing with Alibaba's WAN2.1 text-to-video model lately. What happens when you tweak those mysterious parameters? Let's find out.

You can now fine-tune open-source video models

Train your own versions of Tencent's HunyuanVideo for style, motion, and characters on Replicate.