Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)

Multimodal models typically use different tokenizers to embed different media types, and different encoders when training to generate media rather than classify it.

DeepSeek, the Chinese developer of outstanding open-weights models, has withheld an upcoming update of its flagship model from U.S. chip makers, a move that intensifies the AI rivalry between the U.S. and China.

The Qwen3.5 family of open-weights vision-language models includes impressive larger models as well as a smaller one that outperforms an OpenAI open-weights model 10 times its size.

OpenAI updated its flagship models, extending the ability to use tools and setting the state of the art on a handful of benchmarks, and priced them at the top of the market. Its coding and agentic abilities have enabled Codex, OpenAI’s competitor to Anthropic’s Claude Code, to leap ahead.

Google launched a cheaper, faster successor to its flagship image generator, delivering greater interactivity at roughly half the price.

Google updated its flagship Gemini model, topping several benchmarks while undercutting competitors on performance per dollar.

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.