Alibaba’s Qwen3 blitz

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. We’ve gotten used to top Western labs orchestrating incremental model releases months apart, but China’s top giants have the industry scrambling to maintain up.

Alibaba just released SIX recent Qwen3 variants this week (to date), each flooding the market with capable, specialized options and inching closer to AI’s frontier than ever before.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Alibaba floods market with Qwen3 releases

• Scale AI challenges LMArena with SEAL Showdown

• Create your personal animated miniatures

• Altman details infrastructure push in recent blog

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ALIBABA

🌊 Alibaba floods market with Qwen3 model releases

The Rundown: Alibaba just released a barrage of recent Qwen3 models this week, dropping six recent variants across text, vision, audio, and safety — highlighted by the newly unveiled 1T parameter Qwen-Max.

The small print:

• Max shows near-frontier capabilities in coding and agentic tasks, while its Heavy version achieves perfect scores across math reasoning benchmarks.

• Omni is capable of processing text, images, audio, and video, while supporting speech understanding in 19 languages and generation in 10 languages.

• VL grades out as the highest non-reasoning and open-source visual model, while also surpassing top closed models on a series of benchmarks.

• Alibaba also released LiveTranslate-Flash for real-time interpretation, Guard models for safety moderation, and recent upgraded Coder variants.

Why it matters: OAI, Anthropic, and Google have conditioned us to expect a slower release schedule, but Chinese giants like Alibaba are taking the other approach — with a rapid-fire pace that floods the market with near-frontier, specialized options. Qwen feels the closest a Chinese lab has been to the frontier since DeepSeek’s R1.

TOGETHER WITH HUBSPOT

🧠 100+ ChatGPT prompts to revolutionize your workflow

The Rundown: HubSpot’s free, comprehensive  “The right way to Use ChatGPT at Work” guide provides 100+ ready-to-use prompts to assist professionals boost efficiency and adopt AI-driven workflows.

Inside, you’ll find:

• A fast crash course to master ChatGPT in under half-hour

• Practical industry use cases to spark real-world inspiration

• 100+ prompts to streamline tasks and speed up productivity

• Expert tricks to tackle common AI roadblocks with confidence

Get your free copy and join 10,000+ professionals levelling up with AI.

SCALE AI

🏆 Scale AI challenges LMArena with SEAL Showdown

The Rundown: Scale AI just introduced SEAL Showdown, a benchmarking platform that segments LLM performance by real user preferences across demographics — difficult LMArena’s dominance in AI model evaluation.

The small print:

• SEAL Showdown leverages the corporate’s global contributor network spanning 100 countries and 70 languages to generate rankings through voluntary voting.

• Contributors access frontier models at no cost through Scale’s Playground app, where optional side-by-side comparisons generate authentic preference data.

• Scale blocks data sharing for 60 days after collection and makes voting completely optional to forestall gaming and ensure real user feedback.

• Leaderboards are segmented by user demographics like age, education, and language, giving a granular view of how models perform for various groups.

Why it matters: Leaderboards have grow to be common across the industry, but might not be telling the total picture of how models perform for various ages, education levels, etc. Scale’s release brings each competition to the rankings space and helps provide additional data for which models are best for specific groups and tasks.

AI TRAINING

🤗 Create your personal animated miniatures

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn find out how to create a mini figurine of yourself or a particular product using Google Gemini’s Nano Banana tool, then animate it with Luma Dream Machine to create eye-catching videos for social media or marketing.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to Google Gemini, click “Create images,” and enable the Nano Banana tool

2. Use this prompt: “First ask me to upload a picture, then create a 1/seventh scale commercialized figurine of the characters in the image in a practical style in an actual environment. The figurine is placed on a pc desk with a transparent acrylic base and a toy packaging box”

3. Upload your reference image when prompted and let Gemini generate your figurine scene with desk setup, monitor, and premium packaging

4. Take the generated image to Luma Labs, create a “Latest Board,” and animate with prompts like “Front camera view of this figurine. He takes the phone, tosses it up like a serve, then smashes it toward the camera”

Pro Tip: Be specific about camera angles (front view, close-up, dolly-in), subject motion (which hand does what, timing), and tone for the very best results.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💼 How AI helps IBM reinvent HR with AI

The Rundown: IBM is applying AI across its enterprise to HR, IT, Procurement, and more. By remaking its own operations, it’s demonstrating how the technology can deliver ROI for clients.

Key achievements include:

• 75% productivity gains in domain-specific HR tasks

• 2.1M worker conversations automated annually

• 80+ HR tasks fully handled by AI without human intervention

Is that this what tomorrow’s global firms will appear to be? Read the total case study.

OPENAI

🏗️ Altman details infrastructure push in recent blog

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post revealing plans to construct infra capable of manufacturing one GW of AI capability weekly, arguing that compute expansion will drive each revenue and humanity’s ability to tackle major challenges.

The small print:

• Altman argued that limited compute forces decisions between breakthroughs like curing cancer or universal education, making infrastructure expansion key.

• He said OpenAI plans infrastructure announcements over the approaching months, with recent financing approaches also scheduled for discussion later this 12 months.

• Altman also highlighted global competition concerns, wanting to “help turn that tide” of other nations outpacing the U.S. in chip and energy infrastructure.

• The post comes on the heels of Nvidia’s $100B investment in OpenAI for infrastructure projects this week.

Why it matters: By securing each the compute Altman calls essential and the capital to deploy it rapidly, OpenAI transforms philosophical questions on AI priorities into engineering challenges. With infrastructure this massive, OpenAI shifts from selecting compute-limited priorities to pursuing multiple AI moonshots concurrently.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎶 Suno v5 – SOTA music generation model

• 🤖 Qwen3 Omni – Alibaba’s native end-to-end multilingual omni-modal LLM

• 📶 Deepseek v3.1 Terminus – Latest model with upgraded agentic capabilities and performance

• 🎨 Qwen-Image-Edit – Latest multi-image editing and enhanced consistency

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

AWS Symposium Ottawa is next week! Join public sector leaders on October 1 to shape the longer term of AI in Canada. Register at no cost.*

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five data center sites across Texas, Latest Mexico, Ohio, and the Midwest for Stargate, pushing the project toward its 10GW goal.

Suno released v5 of its music generation model, claiming recent SOTA performance by a big margin with recent creative control and audio upgrades.

Microsoft published a cooling breakthrough in AI chips, etching tiny liquid channels to realize 3x higher heat removal and potentially solving AI’s “melting GPUs” problem.

Google Labs launched Mixboard, a brand new AI concept board that helps users visualize and refine ideas through text prompts and pictures with the Nano Banana editing model.

Abu Dhabi unveiled a brand new technique to grow to be the world’s first fully AI-native government by 2027, planning to deploy 200+ AI solutions across the sector.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Nathan G. in Spokane, WA:

“I run a digital marketing business, an industry heavily impacted by AI. While it’s not replacing marketing, AI is transforming strategies, methods, and tools. I take advantage of it to put in writing emails, create social posts and graphics, track analytics, and plan strategy. Learning AI “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization) has also had a giant role in my work. Recently, I’ve ended up moving from being a digital marketer to leading a team of AI marketers.”

How do you employ AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: Nvidia fuels OpenAI’s compute chase

• Read our last Tech newsletter: One OS to rule all drones

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Winged robo-birds take flight

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create your personal animated miniatures

• RSVP to next live workshop @ 4PM Friday: Automated Deep Research

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown