Tencent Hunyuan and Fudan put out a video and audio model that generates both in one pass, and the headline all day has been native 2K under an MIT licence. We read the licence file and listed the repository. The licence is better than people are saying. The checkpoints are smaller than people are saying. Nobody has run it yet.
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.
Qwen released a new image model today at 7.1 billion parameters, roughly a third the size of everything else in the line, with ComfyUI support the same afternoon. Every earlier Qwen image release was Apache 2.0. This one is research and evaluation only, and we read the licence file rather than the thread about it.
A Mozilla analysis put the open to closed capability gap at about 4.4 months, and it went round the local AI world as good news. It is good news. It is also being read as something it does not say, because the open model doing the catching up is 2.78 trillion parameters and will never see the inside of your computer.
YuE2 landed last week, and what happened next is the best argument for open weights we have seen in a while. Quantised to 8 GB by day two. The missing encoder trained from scratch by a stranger on day five. A LoRA trainer the same day. One thing almost nobody is mentioning, though, and it matters if you plan to earn anything.
Someone asked this morning which models to back up now that NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face. We told people to keep local copies a week ago, and four days ago we wrote about our own disk filling up and breaking our publishing. Both of those are true at once, so here is the version that reconciles them.
On 30 August we told you the licence was a gate rather than a ban. That was not right, and the version we corrected away from was closer to the truth. Here is what the licence actually says, what applying took, and the one clause that should stop a lot of people in this hobby cold.
We ran MiniMax H3 for a full day on a single RTX 5090: talking shots driven by our own voice track, a walk and talk, text to speech, a trained voice, and an eight scene short film with its own soundtrack. Every number here came off our machine. So did the mistakes.
Two unrelated things happened on the same Thursday. The place almost every open model lives got acquired by the company that makes the chips, and the three biggest chatbots went down together because they share a cloud. Here is what we think it means for anyone running AI on their own machine, including the part where our own pipeline broke this morning.
Hugging Face says MiniMax H3 went up on 28 July. Five weeks later there are around 400 repositories with its name on them, new ones arriving at eight to twenty-four a day, and this week the community visibly stopped asking whether it runs and started asking how fast. Here is what that pace actually looks like, and why our own pipeline is not moving anywhere near that quickly.