The bridge nobody documents: connect a local Ollama brain to a real-time 3D VRM face with voice, lip-sync and expressions. The four services, the ports they talk on, and the two traps that cost us days, the thinking-mode stall and the open-mic mistake.
Week of 20 July: open-source AI went enormous, Qwen 3.8 at 2.4 trillion parameters, Kimi K3 at 2.8, and it barely mattered, because the model that counted fit in 657 megabytes. Plus GLM-5.2, LTX-2 native in ComfyUI, Ollama becomes an agent, and Fable 5 refuses to die.
One sentence in, lettered comic pages out, a local LLM writes the script, your GPU draws every panel with the same character in the same style, and an open-source compositor adds bubbles, SFX, and diagonal panel cuts. Tool included.
Week of 13 July: GPT-5.6 lands everywhere, Shanghai AI Lab drops an Apache agent brain, the voice race goes full-duplex, LongCat posts absurd numbers, robots get free eyes, and Fable 5 dodges retirement again.
Everything from our first news episode in readable form: the mystery model that topped OpenRouter, Claude Fable 5’s return (and reprieve), GPT-5.6’s rollout, Suno opening its API, and our own lab report.