AI News: Vibe Jam, The BEST Small LLM, Claude Search, OpenAI Audio Models, and more!

Here's a rundown of the latest happenings in the AI world, covering everything from incredibly fast-paced game development competitions using AI to powerful new language models and creative tools. It's exciting to see smaller models performing exceptionally well, major players adding essential features like web search, and surprising new entrants like LG releasing advanced AI models. The focus is clearly shifting towards making AI more accessible for local use and empowering creators.

Here are the key updates discussed:

• Vibe Coding Jam is in full effect: This is a competition for building web-based multiplayer games using "Vibe Coding." The idea seems to have exploded since a demo of a vibe-coded flight simulator came out recently.
  • Some early submissions are described as "insane" and "legitimately fun."
  • Examples include a Fortnite-style game with Minecraft looks (multiplayer working), a simple safari driving game, a Line Rider style game, a Tetris-like puzzle game built in hours, an 80s aesthetic tank game, a food fight simulator, and an air traffic control game that evolved from 2D to 3D.
  • It's surprising how fast impressive multiplayer games are being created with this approach.
  • You can actually try the games right now, which is pretty cool.
  • It's definitely worth checking out Vibe Jam on Twitter to see all the submissions as the presenter cannot wait to see them.
• Mistral released an incredible small model: This new model, Mistral Small 3.1, is open source and surprisingly outperforms similar larger closed-source models.
  • It does particularly well on the Knowledge GPTQA benchmark, showing very low latency per token and a high GPTQA Diamond score.
  • It beats models like Gemma 3, Claude 3.5 Haiku, GPT4o Mini, and Cohere Eye of Vision.
  • It's relatively small at just 24 billion parameters, making it runnable on a single RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32 GB of RAM, which is great for local use.
  • It's multimodal, meaning it can handle more than just text, and is described as a "Foundation for Advanced Reasoning," suggesting it's good for training into a "thinking model."
  • It has a decent context window of 128,000 tokens.
  • It's encouraged to download and play around with it.
• Claude finally gets Web Search: This has been a long-awaited, and frankly, essential feature ("table stakes").
  • Claude 3.7 and 3.7 Thinking models now have web search capability.
  • This makes Claude another strong alternative to Google Search, joining Grok3, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Mistral.
  • It's particularly useful because Claude is considered one of the best coding models, and now it can reference current API documentation, library info, and web bugs, which is super cool for developers.
• OpenAI released three new audio models: There are significant updates to their text-to-speech (TTS) and transcription models.
  • Two new transcription models, GPT-4o Transcribe and GPT-4o Mini Transcribe, both outperform the previous Whisper model in every language tested.
  • They also introduced a new text-to-speech model that allows for detailed instructions on how the text should be spoken, not just the text itself.
  • You can specify voice affect, tone, pacing, and emotion, similar to giving a prompt or system message.
  • There's a demo site, openai.fm, where you can try out the TTS with different styles like "choral" or "dramatic," and it sounds really good.
  • The interface design is reminiscent of Teenage Engineering, and OpenAI is actually partnering with them.
  • They are holding a competition for the best text-to-speech creations, with the top three most creative winning a $550 Teenage Engineering OB4 speaker. This is a great opportunity to play around with the new model.
  • The code to implement the TTS is also very simple, just a few lines.
• Windsurf Wave 5 is here: This is an update for more traditional coding environments, focusing on improving tab completion.
  • Wave 5 integrates autocomplete, super complete, tab to jump, and tab to import into one "seamless tool."
  • It can write new code, make multi-line edits, and help navigate files.
  • It's seen as a significant leap in quality and speed for passive coding assistance.
  • The good news is that even free users get unlimited Windsurf Tab completion.
• Krea AI released video training: Krea AI now allows users to train their WAN 2.1 model on their own videos.
  • This gives users much more control over their AI video creations.
  • Training the model helps it learn specific styles, objects, and even motions from your uploaded videos.
  • After training, you can create new AI videos that incorporate those learned elements. This is a cool update for video creators wanting a specific aesthetic or subject in their AI generations.
• Notebook LM got a big update with Mindmaps: Notebook LM, a tool for processing documents and podcasts, can now automatically generate a mind map based on the content you provide.
  • This is highlighted as a great way to learn and explore the information extracted from your documents.
  • Even AI personality Jimmy Apples was impressed by this feature.
• Hunyuan announced a major upgrade to their 3D modeling AI: They released two new open-source versions of their 3D generation model, 3D 2.0 MV (multi-view generation) and 3D 2.0 mini.
  • These are open source and available to download and use now.
  • This is considered powerful stuff for creators who want to generate 3D characters for motion graphics, games, or videos.
• Stability AI released Stable Virtual Camera: This new feature allows users to upload 2D images and create immersive 3D videos with controlled camera movements.
  • You can do things like zoom out or move around within the scene generated from the 2D image.
  • This capability is seen as moving closer to a future where entire movies or TV shows could be created by AI by anyone.
  • The weights for the model are open source and free to use for non-commercial projects.
• Gemini finally adds Canvas: Gemini now has the ability to write code and run it directly within the browser.
  • This is a feature already available in tools like Claude and ChatGPT.
  • You can write HTML or JavaScript code, edit it in the browser, run it immediately, and iterate quickly, which is great for "vibe coding" web projects.
• LG just released an open-source thinking model called EXAONE: Surprisingly, LG, a company not typically associated with advanced AI models, released an open-source model focused on enhancing reasoning capabilities and particularly on agentic AI.
  • It comes in three versions: a 32 billion parameter version (EXAONE Deep 32B) that topped the AIMI benchmark, outperforming competitors at just 5% of its size, and smaller 7.8 billion and 2.4 billion parameter versions suitable for local use.
  • The 32B version is shown to be very comparable to models like Deep Seek R1 on benchmarks.
  • It's exciting to see a company like LG entering the space with a performant, open-source model aimed at local usage and agentic capabilities.
  • It's encouraged to download and try it out.