AI TrackerMultimodal news,
for builders.
The latest multimodal news from every AI provider: launches, price changes and retirements, summarized with what they mean for you.
Artificial Analysis: Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus leads US English text-to-speech, HeyGen Voice leads UK English and overall
Artificial Analysis says that in its Controlled Voice Arena, which scores every text-to-speech model on the same eight cloned voices (four US, four UK), Qwen-Audio-3.1-TTS-Plus leads the US English ranking, while HeyGen Voice does better in UK English and leads the overall leaderboard.OpenAI introduces BioBasicsBench, a benchmark of everyday wet-lab science tasks
OpenAI introduces BioBasicsBench, a benchmark of 100 routine wet-lab tasks built with Ligo, a biotech company focused on enzyme design. The tasks use raw experimental evidence (gel images, colony plates, microscopy, sequencing files, instrument exports and videos of bench work) across protein methods, imaging and cytometry, quantification and assays, nucleic acid methods, and molecular cloning. Scientists wrote them from their own experiments, and answers are graded against expert-written rubrics that give partial credit.Cursor adds realtime voice calls with agents
Cursor says you can now talk with your agents in a realtime voice call: describe a change out loud, ask what an agent is working on, and hear updates as the work moves forward. Voice chat works in the Agents Window, the IDE, on web and in Cursor for iOS.Artificial Analysis launches VIALS-AA, a life-sciences visual-reasoning leaderboard where Gemini 4 Carbon leads at 64%
Artificial Analysis has launched VIALS-AA, a leaderboard for Handshake AI's VIALS benchmark. VIALS has 161 tasks in eight domains, in which a model must read a scientific artifact (gel blots, flow cytometry plots, plasmid maps, phylogenies) and draw a specific conclusion.
OpenAI brings GPT-Image-2.6 Flare and Sunburst to the API and Codex
OpenAI released Images 2.6 on November 4 in ChatGPT, Codex and the API, available globally in ChatGPT and Codex on all subscription tiers. In the API it comes as two models, GPT-Image-2.6 Flare and Sunburst. OpenAI says both generate images 50% faster than before. Flare, at low quality, can produce an image in as little as six seconds and improves layout for posters and product imagery. At medium or high quality, Sunburst gives higher-quality images and keeps details more consistent from one edit to the next. ChatGPT Images 2.6 adds GIF output and reference images. OpenAI says people now create 4 billion images per week across ChatGPT, Codex and the API.World Labs releases Frameboy, a real-time demo of its Atlas world model
World Labs released Frameboy, a demo for exploring generated worlds in real time. It runs a highly optimized version of Atlas, the autoregressive world model with camera control that the company introduced two months ago, and streams from cloud GPUs at up to 15 frames per second. World Labs describes Atlas's camera control as pixel-perfect; that is the company's claim.Artificial Analysis ranks FLUX 3 Image Klein #2 among open-weight text-to-image models
Artificial Analysis says Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3 Image Klein, a 5.6B-parameter open-weight image model released on October 15, is the #2 open-weight model on its AA-Image-T2I v2.1 leaderboard, neck and neck with #1 Qwen-Image-2.1. On AA-Image-Editing v2.1 it ranks #3 among open-weight models. The rankings are Artificial Analysis's own.Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash is now live on Vercel's AI Gateway
Vercel says Google DeepMind's Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash video model is live on its AI Gateway, under the model id google/gemini-omni-1.2-flash. Vercel lists clips of 3 to 15 seconds with native audio, edits with up to six reference images, extensions to 30 seconds in total, and resolutions from 360p to 4K in landscape or portrait.Arena ranks Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash #1 in text-to-video and image-to-video
Arena says Google's Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash debuts at #1 in both its Text-to-Video and Image-to-Video leaderboards and at #3 in Video Edit.Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash is now live on OpenRouter
OpenRouter says Google's Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash video model is live on its platform. It lists 15-second clips, resolutions from 360p to 4K, native audio, and about 30% lower per-second pricing than Omni 1.1. OpenRouter says the price is the same as going direct to Google, and that one API now covers video and chat.Ant Ling introduces Ling-3.2-flash, a 560B multimodal model that it says beats Opus 5 on three benchmarks
Ant Ling announced Ling-3.2-flash, which it calls a native multimodal model with 560B total and 25B active parameters. It says the model is stronger at complex visual understanding, long-horizon multimodal agents, 3D understanding and interaction, and medical intelligence.Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash is not announced, but several accounts and OpenRouter's catalog show it
Google has not announced Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, a video-generation model that would follow Omni 1.1 Flash. OpenRouter's model catalog also added a google/gemini-omni-1.2-flash entry on November 5, listing a 131,072-token context. Several accounts report seeing the model:Google releases Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash with 15-second video and 30% lower pricing
Google says Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash is generally available on the Gemini API and Google Cloud, and that this is the first time Gemini Omni is generally available. It generates and edits video natively up to 15 seconds long (up from 10 seconds with Omni 1.1), with duration settable in one-second steps from 3 to 15 seconds.
OpenAI's GPT-Live outbound telephony API is generally available
Justin Uberti, an OpenAI engineer, said on X on November 4 that the GPT-Live outbound telephony API has been promoted to general availability. Developers can now have a GPT-Live voice agent place phone calls through any SIP trunk provider, such as Telnyx or Twilio.OpenRouter's catalog gives OpenAI: GPT-5 Image Mini an expiration date of December 1
OpenRouter's model catalog now shows an expiration date of December 1, 2026 for "OpenAI: GPT-5 Image Mini" (openai/gpt-5-image-mini), a model listed since October 16, 2025 with a 400,000-token context. The entry had no expiration date before. This is a catalog field only; the entry does not say why or what happens to the model after that date.xAI retires grok-imagine-image-quality and grok-imagine-image-pro, serving them with a cheaper model
According to xAI's API release notes, requests to grok-imagine-image-quality and grok-imagine-image-pro are now served by grok-imagine-image-2.0-low, which is grok-imagine-image-2.0 with quality set to low, at a lower per-image price. xAI says no request changes are needed.OpenRouter adds Crouton Alpha, a free stealth model with a 1M-token context
OpenRouter announced a new stealth model, Crouton Alpha, which it describes as "a highly efficient reasoning model built to scale out the work your agents repeat all day". The maker is not named.ai-cli gives any coding agent image, video and audio generation
Chris Tate of Vercel introduced ai-cli (npm i -g ai-cli), a command-line tool that lets an agent generate images, video and audio with any model. His post lists it working with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Vercel's fx harness, with models such as Opus, Flux, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, GLM and Grok.OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra can design a device's enclosure and circuit board, and seeks engineering partners
OpenAI describes how its models help with mechanical and electrical engineering: CAD models, manufacturing drawings, simulations and PCB design. These are OpenAI's own claims.Perplexity releases pplx-embed-v2-context, open-weight vision-language embedding models in 9B and 0.6B
Perplexity released pplx-embed-v2-context, two open-weight vision-language embedding models (9B and 0.6B) on Hugging Face, with a paper written with turbopuffer. Both return one int8 vector per document, or one per chunk that sees the whole document, and both also run in a non-contextual mode with one embedding per document and no chunking.