Week 32, 2026

Why: The longest single-run generation of any current video model at 4K, and the 50-reference input system is the most direct answer yet to character consistency, the problem that breaks most AI video work. Availability is the constraint: it ships inside ByteDance's own apps first, and the previous generation's international rollout was postponed indefinitely.

Why: The first credible attempt to collapse image, video and audio generation into a single model rather than a pipeline of separate ones, from the team behind the most widely self-hosted open image models. Access is the catch: video is gated early-access and the open-weight release has not shipped, so treat availability as limited until FLUX 3 Dev lands.

Why: The strongest open-weight coding model published to date: 62.1 on SWE-bench Pro against GPT-5.5's 58.6, and 81.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1, at roughly a sixth of GPT-5.5's API price. The MIT licence carries no regional restrictions, so the weights can genuinely be self-hosted commercially — which is the reason to choose it over a closed model of similar strength.