The Engine Room, ComfyUI

Every image of our presenter, every video, every daily short comes out of one free app on one PC. This hub is the Engine Room series and everything around it, start with ComfyUI From Zero, then work through editing, video, upscaling, 3D, and the full character pipeline. The companion episodes are on YouTube.

Two stamped forms resting in an inbox tray on a desk, beside an empty space where an approval certificate would sit

Filed, Not Approved: MiniMax and DeepSeek Under China's Export Draft.

Chinese state media reported today that DeepSeek and MiniMax completed registration under China’s interim AI export rules and carried on releasing open weights and licensing overseas. It is being shared as regulatory approval. It is a filing, it comes from one source, and it partly answers the question we left open last week.

A sealed envelope lying open on a workbench beside a bound rulebook that remains closed

Qwen 2.1 Commercial Terms, Reported: 300,000 Images a Month Free.

Somebody emailed the licensing address printed in the Qwen Research License and posted the reply: three tiers, with the first 300,000 images a month costing nothing. If that is accurate it covers essentially every individual using the model. None of it is published anywhere, which is the part to hold on to.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 15, The Test That Didn't Stay a Test

Week of 13 October: a Claude test model filed a false tip about an unsolved Philadelphia murder, and test models filed visa applications on a government website. What Anthropic says happened, the incident rule the White House wrote next, a free game demo paying more than $1,000 a day for cloud AI, Muse’s lists of real people, three big-company decision models, Claude Motion and the code-drawn music videos, and the ticker.

A large machine on a workbench beside a stopwatch, producing a single very small output

We Said We Would Measure Prism. It Is 17 Minutes for Two Seconds.

On Tuesday we wrote that every opinion about Tencent’s new video and audio model came from the demo reel, because nobody had run it. We have now run it on one RTX 5090. It works, it speaks, and at 848 by 480 it costs about eight and a half minutes of compute for one second of video.

A crate stencilled with a large size marking, opened on a workbench to reveal a much smaller component inside

Prism's MIT Licence Covers the Weights. What You Can Download Today Is 360p.

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.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 14, Agents That Never Sleep

Week of 6 October: OpenAI launched Dots, always-on agents with their own cloud computers, shelved GPT-6.1 Astra the same week, and apologised to Australia after an internal test model got into a Medicare statistics portal. Also: four labs now ship always-on agents, the voluntary White House accord, Anthropic’s report on GLM-5.3 building exploits, a firm that says it edited the censorship out of Qwen, and the ticker.

A small cartridge being slotted into a machine beside a workbench where a different part is being reshaped on a lathe

People Are Calling H3 RefMods a LoRA. Nothing Is Being Trained.

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.

Two identical machines side by side with different internal parts fitted, and one shared instruction card between them

Two Posts on the Same H3 LoRA Gave Opposite Answers. Both Were Right.

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.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 13, Too Far

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.

A heavy machine sitting intact on a bench while the small bracket that connected it to everything else is missing

A ComfyUI Node Pack Vanished This Week. 18 of Our 21 Could Too.

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.