Qwen 3 – Alibaba's open model family
Qwen 3 is the current generation of Alibaba Cloud's open-weight large language model family, released under the Apache 2.0 license and positioned by its makers as…
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The frontier of embodied AI
Foundation models. Voice and speech AI. Avatars and synthetic video. Agentic infrastructure. Edge runtimes. And the trust-and-safety surface around them all – analysed by hand, written to last.
Foundation Models
Qwen 3 – Alibaba's open model family
Qwen 3 is the current generation of Alibaba Cloud's open-weight large language model family, released under the Apache 2.0 license and positioned by its makers as frontier-competitive across reasoning, coding and multilingual tasks. For builders weighing an open foundation…
Continue readingWhat we cover
Seven areas of embodied AI. Each is an ongoing body of work, continuously updated as the field moves.
- Foundation Models Frontier model families and the labs behind them.
- Voice & Speech AI TTS, voice cloning, STT, conversational and call-center AI.
- Avatars & Vision Synthetic video, talking avatars, 3D characters, motion capture.
- Agentic AI Agent frameworks, autonomous coders, RAG and agent infrastructure.
- On-Device & Edge AI Local LLM stack, edge hardware, small open models, on-device privacy.
- Trust & Safety Provenance, deepfake detection, AI governance, safety research.
- Industry Tracker Living trackers – open-source AI weekly, funding monthly.
The model lineage
Eight years of foundation models, in three families. Hover any release to read what it changed.
GPT
GPT-1 Jun 2018 117M params The first decoder-only GPT, trained on BookCorpus. The thesis: pre-train broadly, fine-tune cheaply. Read the analysis → GPT-1 Jun 2018 GPT-2 Feb 2019 1.5B params Coherent long-form generation. Released in stages over misuse concerns. Read the analysis → GPT-2 Feb 2019 GPT-3 May 2020 175B params Few-shot learning from prompt examples. The "scale is enough" bet, vindicated. Read the analysis → GPT-3 May 2020 GPT-3.5 Nov 2022 first RLHF The first RLHF model in the line, and the engine behind the original ChatGPT. Read the analysis → GPT-3.5 Nov 2022 GPT-4 Mar 2023 multimodal Vision input added. OpenAI stops disclosing architecture from here on. Read the analysis → GPT-4 Mar 2023 GPT-4o May 2024 omni Native audio, vision and text through a single shared forward pass. Read the analysis → GPT-4o May 2024 GPT-5 Aug 2025 400K context A unified system that routes between fast inference and deep reasoning. Read the analysis → GPT-5 Aug 2025 GPT-5.5 Apr 2026 MMLU 92.4% Codename Spud. The current flagship as of mid-2026. Read the analysis → GPT-5.5 Apr 2026
Llama
Llama 1 Feb 2023 research-only Leaked publicly within a week, which kick-started the open-weight era. Read the analysis → Llama 1 Feb 2023 Llama 2 Jul 2023 permissive The first genuinely commercial open licence. An accident turned into strategy. Read the analysis → Llama 2 Jul 2023 Llama 3 Apr 2024 8B / 70B Redefined what open models could do at their parameter scale. Read the analysis → Llama 3 Apr 2024 Llama 3.1 Jul 2024 405B · 128K The first open model to genuinely rival the closed frontier on benchmarks. Read the analysis → Llama 3.1 Jul 2024 Llama 4 Apr 2025 MoE · multimodal Scout and Maverick: mixture-of-experts, natively multimodal, 10M-token context. Read the analysis → Llama 4 Apr 2025
Stable Diffusion
SD 1.5 2022 512px The foundational open image model, with a vast derivative ecosystem still alive today. Read the analysis → SD 1.5 2022 SD 2.0 late 2022 OpenCLIP The underrated stumble. Changing the text encoder broke the community contract. Read the analysis → SD 2.0 late 2022 SDXL Jul 2023 1024px The recovery. Larger UNet, base-plus-refiner pipeline, dual text encoders. Read the analysis → SDXL Jul 2023 SD 3 Jun 2024 MMDiT A new transformer backbone, but a rocky initial release on human anatomy. Read the analysis → SD 3 Jun 2024 SD 3.5 Oct 2024 8.1B The return to form, and the current generation as of 2026. Read the analysis → SD 3.5 Oct 2024
Recent essays
GPT-5 release timeline and expectations
As of early 2025, GPT-5 is not a shipped product with a public release date. What exists is a pattern of statements from OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman, a…
Stable Video Diffusion – image-to-video
Stable Video Diffusion is Stability AI's open-weight answer to the video generation race: a model that takes a single still image and animates it into a short clip, released with…
xAI – the company and Grok roadmap
xAI is Elon Musk's frontier AI lab, founded in July 2023 to build large language models and pursue what Musk calls "maximally truth-seeking" artificial intelligence. Its flagship…
Claude Haiku – fast small model analyzed
Claude Haiku is Anthropic's fast, small tier: the model you reach for when you need to run millions of requests without watching the meter spin. It trades some reasoning depth and…
AI companies landscape – the 2026 map
The AI industry in 2026 sorts into four layers that behave like different businesses entirely. At the top sit a handful of frontier labs – OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind,…
Stability AI – the company and product line
Stability AI is the London-founded company that released Stable Diffusion in August 2022, the open-weights text-to-image model that put generative imaging on consumer hardware…
ChatGPT image generator – the DALL-E integration
The image generator inside ChatGPT is not a single thing but a lineage. It began as a bolt-on: OpenAI wired DALL-E 3 into the chat interface in late 2023, so a prompt typed into…
Living trackers
Two pieces we republish on a fixed cadence – analyst synthesis, not aggregation.