Top AI News Weekly

Week 8 · Feb 16 – Feb 22, 2026

Qwen3.5 (397B MoE) and Gemini 3.1 Pro push frontier reasoning. ByteDance launches Seed2.0 model family. TTS explodes with Ming-omni-tts, Kani-TTS-2, LuxTTS, and KittenTTS. MonarchRT enables real-time 16 FPS video gen on a single GPU. ZUNA pioneers brain-data foundation models.

36 launches and research drops that matter for enterprise AI builders—curated, tagged, and ready for your next roadmap sync.

New drops

36

Unique sources

32

Key themes

Immersive · Developer · Frontier

frontier

Frontier Models & Research

New reasoning systems, world models, and alignment papers that move the state of the art.

Frontier LLMAlibaba Qwen

Qwen3.5-397B-A17B

Unified vision-language MoE model with 397B total / 17B active params. Uses Gated Delta Networks + sparse MoE for efficient inference. Supports 201 languages and achieves cross-generational parity with Qwen3.

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Frontier LLMGoogle

Gemini 3.1 Pro

Major reasoning upgrade scoring 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2 (more than double 3 Pro). Rolling out across Gemini API, AI Studio, Vertex AI, Gemini CLI, Google Antigravity, and NotebookLM.

View release ↗
Frontier LLMByteDance Seed

Seed2.0 Pro

ByteDance's second-gen foundation model family with Pro, Lite, and Mini tiers. Pro focuses on long-chain reasoning for complex workflows; Lite balances quality and speed; Mini optimizes throughput.

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Compact LLMNanbeige

Nanbeige4.1-3B

Compact 3B-parameter language model designed for efficient deployment with strong performance on reasoning and general tasks.

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DistillationTeichAI

Qwen3-14B-Claude-4.5-Opus Distill

High-reasoning GGUF distillation of Qwen3-14B using Claude 4.5 Opus as the teacher model. Offers Opus-level reasoning in a locally runnable 14B package.

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MultilingualCohere Labs

Tiny Aya Global

Open-weights 3.35B multilingual model optimized for balanced representation across 70+ languages including many lower-resourced ones. Supports downstream adaptation and local deployment.

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NeuroAIZyphra

ZUNA

First brain-data foundation model. 380M-param diffusion autoencoder trained on scalp-EEG signals for denoising, channel reconstruction, and novel signal prediction. A step toward thought-to-text.

View release ↗
Model APIAlibaba Cloud

Qwen3.5 (Alibaba Model Studio)

Qwen3.5 now available through Alibaba Cloud Model Studio with API access, documentation, and enterprise deployment options.

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immersive

Immersive Media & Simulation

Video, audio, and physics-native generation techniques shaping spatial computing.

Visual GenxGen Universe

Capybara

Unified visual creation model supporting T2V, T2I, instruction-based video-to-video, and image editing. Built on diffusion + transformer architecture with multi-GPU distributed inference.

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Image EditFireRedTeam

FireRed-Image-Edit-1.0

General-purpose image editing model with native editing from T2I foundations. Supports text style preservation, old photo restoration, multi-image editing, and virtual try-on. Includes 1,673-pair bilingual benchmark.

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Audio GenResearch

AudioX

Unified audio generation framework for speech, music, and sound effects with cross-modal control and composition capabilities.

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Image GenResearch

Vec2Pix

Novel vector-to-pixel image generation approach enabling precise control over image synthesis from vector representations.

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Video GenResearch

AnchorWeave

Advanced video generation technique using anchor-based temporal weaving for improved consistency and motion coherence in synthesized videos.

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Video EditResearch

LUVE

Learning-based unified video editing framework that provides consistent and high-quality edits across temporal sequences.

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3D GenAI Geeks Group

Code2Worlds

Framework that transforms code descriptions into interactive 3D worlds using AI-driven scene generation and spatial reasoning.

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Music GenGoogle

Gemini Music Generation

Google introduces AI-powered music generation capabilities within the Gemini ecosystem for creative audio production.

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TTS ModelInclusionAI

Ming-omni-tts-0.5B

Unified 0.5B audio model generating speech, music, and sound in one channel. Custom 12.5Hz tokenizer + Patch-by-Patch compression yields 3.1Hz inference. 93% Cantonese accuracy and SOTA emotion control.

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TTS Modelnineninesix

Kani-TTS-2-EN

English text-to-speech model with natural prosody and high-quality voice synthesis for production use cases.

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TTS ModelYatharthS

LuxTTS

Open-source text-to-speech model delivering premium voice quality with support for multiple speaking styles and emotional tones.

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TTS ModelKittenML

KittenTTS

Lightweight TTS engine designed for fast inference and easy integration into applications. Open-source with simple API.

View repo ↗
agents

Agents & Embodied Intelligence

Embodied agents learning to act in complex virtual and hybrid worlds.

AI AgentOpenClaw

OpenClaw

Personal AI assistant running on any OS/platform. Supports WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, and Teams with agent-to-agent sessions and a skills registry (ClawHub).

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Security AgentVXControl

PentAGI

Fully autonomous AI agent system for penetration testing. Multi-agent architecture with Langfuse integration, knowledge graphs (Graphiti), and containerized execution environments.

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DevOps AgentStakpak

Stakpak Agent

Open-source DevOps agent in Rust that ships code on autopilot. Lives on machines 24/7 with adaptive intelligence, security hardening, and MCP/ACP protocol support.

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Agent InfraTheAgentContextLab

OneContext

Context management framework for AI agents providing unified memory, retrieval, and state persistence across multi-turn interactions.

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Commerce AIShopOS

ShopOS AI

AI-powered shopping platform with intelligent product discovery, comparison, and purchasing workflows for e-commerce automation.

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Agent FrameworkZeroClaw Labs

ZeroClaw

Minimalist AI agent framework focused on zero-configuration setup and rapid prototyping for conversational AI applications.

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Edge AgentTinyAGI

TinyClaw

Ultra-lightweight agent runtime designed for resource-constrained environments with minimal memory footprint and fast startup.

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tooling

Developer Tooling & Infra

Frameworks, playbooks, and OSS repos that level-up AI engineering velocity.

Video InfraInfini AI Lab

MonarchRT

Sparse attention method for video generation DiTs using Monarch matrices. Achieves 95% attention sparsity with no quality loss and 1.4–11.8x speedup over FlashAttention. Enables real-time 16 FPS video on a single RTX 5090.

View project ↗
Video InfraHao AI Lab

FastVideo

Unified inference and post-training framework for accelerated video generation. Features sparse distillation (>50x denoising speedup), Video Sparse Attention, and FSDP2 scalable training across H100/A100/4090.

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LLM Framework0xPlaygrounds

Rig

Build modular and scalable LLM applications in Rust. Supports multiple providers with composable agents, tools, and RAG pipelines. Used by 500+ downstream projects.

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OCR ModelRoots Automation

GutenOCR-3B

Specialized 3B OCR VLM trained on business documents and scientific articles. Supports full-page reading, grounded text detection with bounding boxes, and localized reading within user-specified regions.

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OCR ModelRedNote HILab

Dots.OCR-1.5

Compact OCR model optimized for document digitization with high accuracy on complex layouts and multi-language text recognition.

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GuideHugging Face

OCR Open Models Guide

Comprehensive blog post comparing cutting-edge open OCR models, evaluation methodology, and tools for running models locally and remotely.

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Cloud InfraGrovio AI

Grovio CDK Stacks

AWS CDK infrastructure stacks for deploying AI workloads with production-ready patterns for compute, storage, and networking.

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Vector OpsAlibaba

ZVEC

High-performance vector encoding library from Alibaba optimized for large-scale similarity search and embedding operations.

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EssayTaalas

Taalas: Path to Ubiquitous AI

In-depth essay exploring the trajectory toward ubiquitous AI adoption, covering infrastructure scaling, edge deployment, and enterprise integration challenges.

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