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Alibaba's Qwen3 blitz

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Zach Mink

September 24, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. We’ve gotten used to top Western labs orchestrating incremental model releases months apart, but China’s top giants have the industry scrambling to keep up.

Alibaba just released SIX new Qwen3 variants this week (so far), both flooding the market with capable, specialized options and inching closer to AI’s frontier than ever before.

In today’s AI rundown:

Alibaba floods market with Qwen3 releases
Scale AI challenges LMArena with SEAL Showdown
Create your own animated miniatures
Altman details infrastructure push in new blog
4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ALIBABA

🌊 Alibaba floods market with Qwen3 model releases

Image source: Alibaba

The Rundown: Alibaba just released a barrage of new Qwen3 models this week, dropping six new variants across text, vision, audio, and safety — highlighted by the newly unveiled 1T parameter Qwen-Max.

The details:

Max shows near-frontier capabilities in coding and agentic tasks, while its Heavy version achieves perfect scores across math reasoning benchmarks.
Omni is capable of processing text, images, audio, and video, while supporting speech understanding in 19 languages and generation in 10 languages.
VL grades out as the top non-reasoning and open-source visual model, while also surpassing top closed models on a series of benchmarks.
Alibaba also released LiveTranslate-Flash for real-time interpretation, Guard models for safety moderation, and new upgraded Coder variants.

Why it matters: OAI, Anthropic, and Google have conditioned us to expect a slower release schedule, but Chinese giants like Alibaba are taking the opposite approach — with a rapid-fire pace that floods the market with near-frontier, specialized options. Qwen feels the closest a Chinese lab has been to the frontier since DeepSeek’s R1.

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A quick crash course to master ChatGPT in under 30 minutes
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SCALE AI

🏆 Scale AI challenges LMArena with SEAL Showdown

Image source: Scale AI

The Rundown: Scale AI just introduced SEAL Showdown, a benchmarking platform that segments LLM performance by real user preferences across demographics — challenging LMArena's dominance in AI model evaluation.

The details:

SEAL Showdown leverages the company’s global contributor network spanning 100 countries and 70 languages to generate rankings through voluntary voting.
Contributors access frontier models for free through Scale's Playground app, where optional side-by-side comparisons generate authentic preference data.
Scale blocks data sharing for 60 days after collection and makes voting completely optional to prevent gaming and ensure genuine user feedback.
Leaderboards are segmented by user demographics like age, education, and language, giving a granular view of how models perform for different groups.

Why it matters: Leaderboards have become common across the industry, but may not be telling the full picture of how models perform for different ages, education levels, etc. Scale’s release brings both competition to the rankings space and helps provide additional data for which models are best for specific groups and tasks.

AI TRAINING

🤗 Create your own animated miniatures

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a mini figurine of yourself or a specific product using Google Gemini's Nano Banana tool, then animate it with Luma Dream Machine to create eye-catching videos for social media or marketing.

Step-by-step:

Go to Google Gemini, click "Create images," and enable the Nano Banana tool
Use this prompt: "First ask me to upload an image, then create a 1/7th scale commercialized figurine of the characters in the picture in a realistic style in a real environment. The figurine is placed on a computer desk with a transparent acrylic base and a toy packaging box"
Upload your reference image when prompted and let Gemini generate your figurine scene with desk setup, monitor, and premium packaging
Take the generated image to Luma Labs, create a "New Board," and animate with prompts like "Front camera view of this figurine. He takes the phone, tosses it up like a serve, then smashes it toward the camera"

Pro Tip: Be specific about camera angles (front view, close-up, dolly-in), subject motion (which hand does what, timing), and tone for the best results.

PRESENTED BY IBM

💼 How AI is helping IBM reinvent HR with AI

The Rundown: IBM is applying AI across its enterprise to HR, IT, Procurement, and more. By remaking its own operations, it's demonstrating how the technology can deliver ROI for clients.

Key achievements include:

75% productivity gains in domain-specific HR tasks
2.1M employee conversations automated annually
80+ HR tasks fully handled by AI without human intervention

Is this what tomorrow's global companies will look like? Read the full case study.

OPENAI

🏗️ Altman details infrastructure push in new blog

Image source: Nano Banana / The Rundown

The Rundown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post revealing plans to build infra capable of producing one GW of AI capacity weekly, arguing that compute expansion will drive both revenue and humanity's ability to tackle major challenges.

The details:

Altman argued that limited compute forces choices between breakthroughs like curing cancer or universal education, making infrastructure expansion key.
He said OpenAI plans infrastructure announcements over the coming months, with new financing approaches also scheduled for discussion later this year.
Altman also highlighted global competition concerns, wanting to “help turn that tide” of other nations outpacing the U.S. in chip and energy infrastructure.
The post comes on the heels of Nvidia’s $100B investment in OpenAI for infrastructure projects this week.

Why it matters: By securing both the compute Altman calls essential and the capital to deploy it rapidly, OpenAI transforms philosophical questions about AI priorities into engineering challenges. With infrastructure this massive, OpenAI shifts from choosing compute-limited priorities to pursuing multiple AI moonshots simultaneously.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

🎶 Suno v5 - SOTA music generation model
🤖 Qwen3 Omni - Alibaba’s native end-to-end multilingual omni-modal LLM
📶 Deepseek v3.1 Terminus - New model with upgraded agentic capabilities and performance
🎨 Qwen-Image-Edit - New multi-image editing and enhanced consistency

📰 Everything else in AI today

AWS Symposium Ottawa is next week! Join public sector leaders on October 1 to shape the future of AI in Canada. Register for free.*

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced five data center sites across Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and the Midwest for Stargate, pushing the project toward its 10GW target.

Suno released v5 of its music generation model, claiming new SOTA performance by a significant margin with new creative control and audio upgrades.

Microsoft published a cooling breakthrough in AI chips, etching tiny liquid channels to achieve 3x better heat removal and potentially solving AI’s “melting GPUs” problem.

Google Labs launched Mixboard, a new AI concept board that helps users visualize and refine ideas through text prompts and images with the Nano Banana editing model.

Abu Dhabi unveiled a new strategy to become the world's first fully AI-native government by 2027, planning to deploy 200+ AI solutions across the sector.

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COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Nathan G. in Spokane, WA:

"I run a digital marketing business, an industry heavily impacted by AI. While it’s not replacing marketing, AI is transforming strategies, methods, and tools. I use it to write emails, create social posts and graphics, track analytics, and plan strategy. Learning AI “GEO” (Generative Engine Optimization) has also had a big role in my work. Recently, I’ve ended up moving from being a digital marketer to leading a team of AI marketers.”

How do you use AI? Tell us here.