Chinese AI startup Zhipu AI has released GLM-5V-Turbo, a multimodal model that processes images, video, and text and is designed for use in agent workflows.
OpenAI decides the best way to fight critical AI coverage is to own a newsroom
OpenAI has acquired tech talk show TBPN. The show will supposedly remain editorially independent but report to OpenAI’s communications department. That’s as contradictory as it sounds. So what’s OpenAI really after?
Japanese AI startup Sakana AI has unveiled "Sakana Marlin," its first product for business customers. The system works autonomously: give it a topic, and it researches on its own for up to eight hours, then delivers detailed reports and presentations. Sakana AI says the tool can produce professional strategy analyses that would normally take human teams several weeks.
Sample output from "Sakana Marlin": after autonomous research, the tool creates text reports and presentation slides on a given topic (here: AI trends in the financial sector). | Image: Sakana AI
The company is looking for beta testers in finance, research, and business consulting. The beta is free, but requires registration (the form is in Japanese). The biggest weakness of automated reports like these is hard-to-spot AI errors, something the startup doesn't address in its announcement.
Microsoft has introduced MAI-Transcribe-1, a speech-to-text model supporting 25 languages that achieves the lowest word error rate of any model tested on the FLEURS benchmark, beating Scribe v2, Whisper-large-V3, GPT-Transcribe, and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. The model is also built to handle tough recording conditions like background noise, poor audio quality, and overlapping speech, Microsoft says.
MAI-Transcribe-1 (green) leads in word error rate on the FLEURS benchmark in most of the 25 languages tested, outperforming Scribe v2, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, Whisper-large-v3, and GPT-Transcribe. | Image: Microsoft
Microsoft is rolling out MAI-Transcribe-1 across Copilot Voice and Microsoft Teams. Developers can try it as a public preview through Microsoft Foundry and the Microsoft AI Playground. The model runs 2.5 times faster than Microsoft's previous Azure Fast offering and costs $0.36 per audio hour. Combined with MAI-Voice-1 and a language model, it can also power voice agents, Microsoft says.
Cohere and Mistral recently released open-source alternatives that perform at a similar level.
Alibaba has released Qwen3.6-Plus, its third proprietary AI model in just a few days. The model is available through the Alibaba Cloud Model Studio API and offers a context window of one million tokens. According to the Qwen team, the focus is on significantly improved capabilities for agentic coding, including frontend development and complex code tasks.
In benchmarks published by Alibaba, the model partially outperforms Anthropic's older flagship model Claude 4.5 Opus, which was replaced by the stronger 4.6 Opus in December 2025. It's worth noting that some of these measurements were conducted by Alibaba itself.
Qwen3.6-Plus outperforms the older 3.5 model and in some cases beats Opus. However, the Opus 4.6 released in December 2025 scores 65.4 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.0, putting it ahead of Qwen3.6-Plus. | Image: Alibaba
For a long time, Alibaba released its Qwen models as open source, but the company has recently changed course. The latest Qwen3.5-Omni is also not freely available. Alibaba wants to drive more revenue from enterprise customers with its proprietary models, as its cloud division faces intense competition from ByteDance.
According to Bloomberg, Alibaba is targeting $100 billion in AI revenue over the next five years. Qwen3.6-Plus will be integrated into the Qwen chatbot app and the company's new enterprise AI service Wukong.
