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.

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.

The DIY AI Brief, Ep. 12, Say What

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.

Make a Photoreal AI Film With No Cuts: The MiniMax H3 SeedHunter Chain in ComfyUI

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.

A small compact machine on a workbench with a paper tag tied to it, beside larger older machines with no tags

Qwen-Image-2.1 Fits on Far Less Hardware. It Also Dropped Apache 2.0.

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 large stack of rendered video clips beside a much smaller stack of the ones that made the final edit

We Rendered 105 Clips to Use 44. That Is What AI Video Actually Costs.

Somebody asked today how you count the real cost of AI video once the failed generations are included. We published a 16 minute episode this morning, we keep every take we render, so here are our actual numbers: what we made, what we used, what the retries cost, and the line item nobody prices.