📆 ThursdAI - Multimodal SOTAs (StepFun, Cohere), 3 new Qwens, Runway Alpha, Flux[Krea] &Charm agents

Quick Overview

The AI news show "ThursdAI" covered a flurry of recent open-source model releases, with a significant focus on new iterations from Quen, including the Quen 3 Coder Flash, and updates to their reasoning and non-thinking models. Other key releases discussed were GLM 4.5 from ZAI (formerly Jipu AI), Command-R Vision from Cohere, and Step 3 from Stepfun, highlighting advancements in multimodal capabilities and efficiency, alongside a viral tool called Crush from Charm Bracelet.

Key Points: Quen released multiple new models, including the "Quen 3 Coder Flash" (also referred to as "Quen 3 30B A3B coder"), a three billion parameter model capable of running locally at high speeds, and updated their "thinking" and "non-thinking" models with 257 versions. ZAI (formerly Jipu AI) launched GLM 4.5, a 355 billion parameter model with unified reasoning and coding capabilities, though its benchmark reporting and comparison methods were critiqued for lack of transparency. Cohere released Command-R Vision, a state-of-the-art multimodal AI model for enterprises, featuring image and text reasoning, but with restrictive licensing (CC BY-NC) and compared primarily against Western models. Stepfun introduced Step 3, a new open-source multimodal reasoning model with 321 billion parameters and 38 billion active parameters, claiming significant speed improvements and new benchmark results, though access was initially limited to Chinese phone numbers. A viral tool named Crush from Charm Bracelet (a fork of Open Code) was highlighted for its extreme speed, processing "39 to 50 million tokens every hour," with the creator attributing the buzz partly to user dissatisfaction with Anthropic "nerfing" Claude. The show also touched on other releases like GLM 4.5's predecessor GLM 32B being strong in math and astronomy, RC's AFM and AFM 4.5 base models trained from scratch, and Alibaba's Tongyi releasing the open-source video generation model W1 2.2. The lack of expected major releases from OpenAI (like GPT-5) or an open-source equivalent was noted, with speculation about a secret model called "Horizon Alpha" on OpenRouter potentially being the latter.