Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Mistral compressed Mistral Small 3.1 into much smaller versions, yielding a family of relatively small, open-weights, vision-language models that perform better by some measures than competing models of similar size. The method combines pruning and distillation.

An open source vision-language model unleashes minion agents that enable it to perform tasks more quickly and effectively.

Image generators often mangle text. An open-weights model outperforms open and proprietary competitors in text rendering.

Over the past few years, we have seen rapid progress in models that jointly reason over text, images, sequences, graphs, and time series. Yet in biomedical settings, these capabilities often remain fragmented, brittle, or difficult to interpret.

AI research in 2026 should confront a simple but transformative realization: Models that predict are not the same as systems that act. The latter is what we actually need.

Enabling a pretrained large language model to process a data type other than text (say, images), possibly in a specialized domain (say, radiology), typically requires thousands to millions of examples that pair the other data (perhaps x-rays) with text.

Disney, the entertainment conglomerate that owns Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm and its own animated classics from 101 Dalmatians to Zootopia, licensed OpenAI to use its characters in generated videos.

Runway’s GWM-1 family of video-generation models respond to user input in real time while producing scenes that remain consistent regardless of the camera’s position.

Amazon raised the competitive profile of its foundation models and added services for custom model training and an agent platform for browser automation.

Baidu debuted two models: a lightweight, open-weights, vision-language model and a giant, proprietary, multimodal model built to take on U.S. competitors.

Google introduced Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro, its flagship vision-language and image-generation models, and deployed them to billions of users worldwide.

Alibaba rounded out the Qwen3 family with its biggest large language model to date as well as smaller models that process text, images, video, and/or audio.

Google revamped its roster of models, closed and open, and added more AI-powered features to its existing products.

Google refreshed its experimental tools for composers and producers.

ChatGPT’s image generator is available via API.