Fal doubles its valuation to $16B on $1.3B round
Fal, a startup that hosts and runs AI video, image and audio models, raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, double its valuation from earlier in the year.
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NVIDIA releases Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe and Granary 2
On 28 October 2026 Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight, free speech recognition model covering up to 40 languages, alongside the second version of its Granary speech dataset.
PFN releases a 53-language translation model built with NICT
On 26 October 2026 PFN released the weights of PLaMo 3 Translate, a 53-language translation model built on a base model from joint research with NICT, in four sizes from 0.8B to 31B and several quantised formats.
IFM and Inception42 release the six-model Jais 3 family
On 15 October 2026, IFM and Inception42 announced Jais 3, six Arabic-centric language models from 900 million to 375 billion parameters plus a speech recogniser, evaluated on 24 audited Arabic benchmarks.
OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Sol at DevDay 2026
On 29 September 2026 OpenAI released GPT-6.1 Sol at its DevDay developer event, saying it nearly matched GPT-6 Astra at lower cost. A planned Astra release was withheld over safety results, and GPT-6.1 Terra followed in October.
IFM launches the six-model K2 Horizon fleet
On 3 September 2026 the Institute of Foundation Models announced K2 Horizon, a fleet of six models released together, each shipped with its training data, recipe and evaluations, and steered by a router that picks the cheapest adequate model per task.
Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion
On 3 September 2026 Nvidia agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Hugging Face said it would remain an open platform, and the deal was expected to close in the first half of 2027 pending regulatory approval.
StepFun releases Step 5 Preview
In September 2026 StepFun released Step 5 Preview as its new flagship foundation model. It is a sparse MoE with 600 billion total parameters, supports up to 1 million tokens of context, and is offered through the StepFun Open Platform API.
DeepSeek-V4-Pro reaches general availability
On 13 August 2026 DeepSeek launched the general-availability version of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, with agent upgrades, adjustable reasoning effort, OpenAI Responses API support and peak and off-peak API pricing.
Lovable raises a $400M Series C at a $13.3B valuation
Lovable raised a $400M Series C on 12 August 2026 at a $13.3B valuation, led by Menlo Ventures, after users created more than 60 million projects on the platform since its November 2024 launch.
Alibaba releases Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model
Alibaba released Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model, as a cloud service on 3 August 2026, and published open weights for a variant of it on 12 August 2026.
MCP publishes the 2026-07-28 specification with a stateless core
On 28 July 2026 the Model Context Protocol project published a specification built on a stateless core, turning MCP into a request/response protocol whose requests any instance behind a plain round-robin load balancer can serve.
Google releases Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber
On 21 July 2026 Google announced three Gemini models at once: Gemini 3.6 Flash, a cheaper and faster 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, a security-focused variant limited to governments and trusted partners.
SpaceXAI releases Grok 4.5, co-trained with Cursor
On 16 July 2026 xAI released Grok 4.5, co-trained with Cursor, and made it the default model in Grok Build. xAI also published its coding benchmark results.
Meta releases Muse Spark 1.1 and opens the Meta Model API
On 9 July 2026 Meta released Muse Spark 1.1, an upgrade built for agentic tasks, with a 1-million-token context and access for developers through the Meta Model API in public preview.
TRAE splits into TRAE Work and TRAE IDE
On 9 June 2026 TRAE renamed its standalone SOLO agent as TRAE Work, an AI workspace for product managers, analysts, marketers and others. TRAE IDE stayed as the product for developers.
OpenAI confidentially files for an IPO
On 8 June 2026 OpenAI confirmed it had filed confidentially for an IPO with the US SEC, against a 2025 operating loss of $20.92 billion and annualised revenue above $20 billion. The listing was later pushed to 2027.
Jury rejects Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI
A jury in Oakland ruled for OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Microsoft on 18 May 2026, finding that Elon Musk's claims were filed too late under the three-year statute of limitations. Musk says he will appeal.
Baidu releases ERNIE 5.1
Baidu released ERNIE 5.1 on 9 May 2026, a model derived from ERNIE 5.0's pre-training with about a third of its total parameters and much lower training cost, after a preview build topped Chinese models on LMArena.
StepFun completes a US$2.5 billion round ahead of a Hong Kong IPO
In May 2026 The Standard reported that StepFun had completed a funding round of about US$2.5 billion ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing, after converting into a joint-stock company in April.
Anthropic raises $65 billion
In May 2026 Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, a Series H round that mixed new capital with $15 billion of earlier hyperscaler commitments, including $5 billion from Amazon.