Week 43, 2026

Wan 3.0 is Alibaba's video generation model, in public beta from August 6, 2026 and formally launched August 24. One model handles text-to-video, image-to-video from a first frame or a first and last frame, and reference-based generation, taking text, image, video and audio as inputs. Clips run from 2 to 30 seconds at 30 fps, in 480p, 720p or 1080p. Alibaba Cloud Model Studio serves it as wan3.0-video, with a faster wan3.0-video-prime variant that Alibaba says matches its capabilities. Moving from Wan 2.7 needs only the model name changed, and the maximum length doubles from 15 to 30 seconds.

Suno v6, announced September 9, 2026, is three music models: v6, the flagship for precise, polished songs; v6-wild, for less predictable and more varied output; and v6-mini, a faster, more efficient model available on every plan. Suno says v6 was developed with industry partners including Warner Music Group, BMG and Believe. The release adds editing that works on a finished song: change one section with plain-language instructions, build a mashup from several songs, and sample or isolate parts of a track. As v6 rolls out, Suno is retiring its previous models and moving entirely to the v6 generation.

Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo are ElevenLabs' text-to-speech models launched September 28, 2026. v4 is the expressive model for narration and long-form audio; Turbo is the real-time version, with a median inference latency of about 100 ms and about 150 ms to first speech, per ElevenLabs. Both cover 90+ languages, take inline audio tags such as [whispers] or [door slams] to steer delivery and add sound effects, and keep pacing steady across long scripts. Instant Voice Clones work from ten seconds of audio, and Professional Voice Clones, unavailable on v3, are supported again. Generations run up to 10,000 characters. Both are available in the ElevenLabs apps, through the API by switching model_id, and in ElevenAgents.

Step 5 Preview is StepFun's flagship model, published as downloadable weights on October 15, 2026 after an earlier hosted release. It is a sparse mixture-of-experts model with about 600 billion total parameters and 27 billion active per token, takes text and images as input, returns text, and supports up to one million tokens of context, aimed at coding and long professional work. Weights ship in BF16 and FP8 under the StepFun Model License 1.0, which StepFun describes as Apache-2.0-style with additional attribution and commercial-licence conditions. The model card gives example deployments of four B300 or eight H200 GPUs for FP8, and twice that for BF16, with vLLM, SGLang or Transformers.

Nemotron 3.5 Super VL is Nvidia's open multimodal model, released October 15, 2026. It has 120 billion total parameters and 12 billion active, combines Mamba-2, mixture-of-experts and attention layers with a C-RADIO vision encoder, accepts images and text, returns text, and supports up to one million tokens of context. Weights ship in BF16 for customisation and NVFP4 for deployment, with a speculative-decoding companion checkpoint, under the OpenMDW-1.1 licence, which permits commercial use. Nvidia also published the datasets and training recipes. Artificial Analysis scores it 26 on its Intelligence Index, the highest of any US open-weight model, while using about 60% fewer output tokens per task than Nemotron 3 Super. A smaller sibling, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt (74B total, 9B active, 256K...