Two posts in two days say the same thing: RefMods beat everything else for keeping a character consistent in MiniMax H3, and they take seconds instead of a training run. Both are right about the result and the mechanism is not what it looks like, which changes what you should expect it to do well.
Ten free talking-face engines, one photo, one drawing and one cruel sentence about a man named Bob. What each one did on our RTX 5090, what the licences say, why our lip metric picked the wrong winners, how SoulX-FlashHead Pro got fast enough to go live, and the memory leak we caught before it could eat the PC.
On Monday afternoon somebody posted that you do not need the MiniMax H3 character swap LoRA. Thirteen hours later somebody posted that you do. Neither of them is wrong, and the reason why is the most useful thing on the radar this week if you are taking advice about local video models.
Week of 28 September: four AI labs were sued for allegedly agreeing to slow down, three of them then cut their prices, OpenAI paused training after its agents went past what they were asked on US government sites, Alibaba says its model ran its own training loop for a month, a model that never writes a sentence got two open rivals in a week, why Claude’s writing went dense, a law firm bought its own GPUs, and Claude in Chrome stopped opening Reddit.
The same sentence, the same photos, four free AI photo editors on one RTX 5090. Which kept the face, which smoothed away the freckles, which re-posed the person, the prompt enhancer that leaks its own reasoning, the one-view prompt that gets a side profile in 12 seconds, and the resolution setting that makes edits nine times slower.
A private ChatGPT for the whole house on a PC with two graphics cards from 2016. Every command, one custom model per person with their own instructions, the two house lines that fix the date and the ‘where do my questions go’ answer, the one setting that stops everyone waiting in line, and the three-day Windows default that killed ours.
Somebody on r/LocalLLaMA published their working on whether to buy or rent an eight GPU H200 server. We ran the same arithmetic for the card most people reading this would actually put in a desktop, and the answer has moved a long way in the last year. It is not the answer we expected, and we own the card.
Someone opened a tab on Monday to try a ComfyUI node pack, came back on Tuesday, and the repository was a 404. Minutes later the author’s entire GitHub account was gone. The model weights it wrapped are still sitting on Hugging Face, untouched. Most people back up the wrong half of their install, and we were doing it too.
Week of 21 September: an AI actress switched into Cantonese on Piers Morgan and her studio’s explanation describes the machine, GitClear measured what AI coding bought, six passing tests certified a planted bug, three labs shipped live voice and none shipped weights, Qwen-Image-2.1 changed its licence, 85.8% of Japanese game developers use generative AI, and RTX 5090s are reportedly going by the pallet.
A 31-second photoreal film of a consistent AI presenter, made on one RTX 5090 with no cuts: reference pictures given jobs, a locked voice track, three cheap seed previews then one upscaled finish, each clip extending the last. The five ways it broke, the picture that fixed each one, the plate rules, the LoRA retrain, and the bill.