Black Forest Labs, the team behind the FLUX image generation models, published Self-Flow on March 10, 2026: an open-source framework that trains image, video, and audio generation models 2.8x faster without requiring external encoders
Runway launched Runway Characters on March 9, 2026, a real-time video agent API that turns any image into a fully expressive, conversational digital persona
Pika Labs launched AI Selves on March 7, 2026, a feature that creates persistent AI video avatars from user-uploaded reference material. Each AI Self has memory, personality traits, and can appear in any scene the creator generates through Pika's existing text-to-video pipeline
ElevenLabs launched its Iconic Voice Marketplace in early March 2026, a licensing platform where celebrity voices are made available to businesses and creators for commercial use
Helios is a 14-billion-parameter open-source video model that runs at 19.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100, generating up to 60 seconds of video in real time. Built by Peking University, ByteDance, and Canva, it launched under the Apache 2.0 license on March 4, 2026