Google Maps AI Adds Film Location Scouting via Street View
Google Maps Imagery Grounding lets creators place AI-generated visuals in real Street View scenes, announced at Cloud Next 2026. Film crews can now scout locations from their desk.
CityRAG Turns a Street Photo Into a Navigable City Walkthrough Video
Researchers from Google, Cornell, and Stanford built CityRAG, an AI that generates navigable city walkthrough videos from a single street photo matched to real-world geography.
Seedance 2.0 Now Available via Runway API
ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, ranked #1 for image-to-video on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, is now available via the Runway API for developers.
Canva AI 2.0 Launches Agentic Design Assistant at Create 2026
Canva launched Canva AI 2.0 on April 16, 2026 at Create in Los Angeles, upgrading its AI assistant into a fully agentic design engine with tool orchestration, persistent memory, and workflow integrations.
Tencent Open-Sources HY-World 2.0: 3D World Generation
Tencent open-sourced HY-World 2.0 on April 16, 2026, a multi-modal framework that turns text or images into navigable 3D environments with meshes and Gaussian Splattings ready for Unity, Unreal Engine, and Blender.
Gemini Now Uses Your Google Photos to Generate Personal Images
Google added Nano Banana 2-powered personalized image generation to the Gemini app on April 16, 2026, letting subscribers create images grounded in their own Google Photos library without writing detailed prompts.
Alibaba Happy Oyster Lets You Walk Through AI-Generated 3D Worlds
Alibaba's Happy Oyster generates navigable 3D environments and interactive video from text prompts, letting creators walk through and direct AI-built worlds in real time.
Splice Launches AI Sample Variations with Built-In Creator Payouts
Splice launched Variations and Craft on April 15, 2026, letting producers remix any sample from its 3-million-sound library while automatically compensating the original creator.
Adobe Firefly Video Editor Adds Kling 3.0 and Frame.io Drive
Adobe Firefly Video Editor adds Kling 3.0 AI video models, Frame.io Drive, and Enhance Speech at NAB 2026, giving creators a full AI production pipeline.
Game Studios Hit 4-20x Faster With AI
Game studios reorganizing around AI are completing prototypes 4x faster and generating UI assets up to 20x faster, according to new Wharton research.
ChatGPT Pro Adds $100 Tier With 5x Codex Limits
OpenAI launched a new $100/month ChatGPT Pro tier on April 9, delivering 5x more Codex usage than Plus and filling the gap between the $20 and $200 plans.
Suno Licensing Talks With Universal and Sony Stall Over Download Rights
Suno licensing negotiations with Universal Music Group and Sony Music have stalled over a core disagreement: whether users can download and share AI-generated songs outside the platform.
PrismAudio Turns Silent AI Video Into Stereo
PrismAudio, developed by Alibaba FunAudioLLM team, generates spatial stereo audio directly from silent AI video files in an average of 0.63 seconds.
LM Studio Acquires Locally AI for Mobile
LM Studio acquired Locally AI, a mobile app for running large language models on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, expanding its local AI platform across devices.
Anthropic Withholds Claude Mythos: The AI Too Dangerous to Release
Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a model so capable at finding software vulnerabilities that the company is refusing to release it publicly.
DeepSeek V4 Will Run Exclusively on Huawei Chips
DeepSeek V4 will run exclusively on Huawei Ascend 950PR processors, marking a milestone in China's push to build advanced AI without American chip technology.
Cursor 3 Rebuilds AI Coding Editor as Agent Workspace
Cursor shipped a complete overhaul on April 2, replacing its code editor with a unified workspace built around AI agents, multi-agent management, and cloud-local handoff.
OpenAI Buys TBPN Media Network for Hundreds of Millions
OpenAI acquired TBPN, the Technology Business Programming Network, a live tech news show with 300,000 followers, for low hundreds of millions of dollars.
Google Vids Adds AI Avatars With Veo 3.1 and Free Video
Google Vids now lets Workspace users create AI-directed avatars using Veo 3.1, generate custom soundtracks with Lyria 3, and produce up to 10 free video clips per month.
Figma Make Kits Let Design Systems Power AI Generation
Figma launched Make Kits and Make Attachments, two features that let design system authors teach Figma Make how to use their components and reference real data during AI generation.
Alibaba Wan2.7-Image Unifies AI Generation and Editing
Alibaba released Wan2.7-Image, a unified AI model that handles both image generation and editing in one system, with fine-grained personalization, color control, and a Pro variant capable of 4K output.
Falcon Perception: 0.6B Vision Model Beats Meta SAM 3
Technology Innovation Institute releases Falcon Perception, a compact 0.6B parameter vision model that beats Meta SAM 3 across six key benchmarks while running on consumer hardware.
PrismML Open-Sources Bonsai 8B: A True 1-Bit LLM
PrismML emerged from stealth and open-sourced Bonsai 8B, a true 1-bit large language model that fits 8.2 billion parameters into just 1.15 GB of memory, roughly 14x more compressed than comparable 16-bit models.
H Company Holo3 Sets New SOTA for GUI Agents
H Company released Holo3, a vision-language model optimized for GUI agents that sets new state-of-the-art on the OSWorld-Verified benchmark, beating proprietary models with only 3B active parameters.