AI Product Updates: New Features and Releases

Alibaba open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1, a lightweight 7B model that unifies generation and editing, supports native transparent layers, up to 10 reference images and local refinement, with weights available for download.

Unusual Whales is holding its first hackathon, where participants use its API and MCP with AI agents to build dashboards, alerts, backtests or bots, with 1,000 USDC for first place over one month.

An Omarchy-native addon that manages local AI, Claude, Codex and other agent windows in one place, with a secure P2P bridge for taking over from Android.

A blogger recommends a new open-source, free video creation tool and links to it, without giving its name or feature details.

Astarter now runs on DeAgentAI's model gateway, which offers its proprietary models and 38 third-party models with Judgment for decisions, replacing per-model integrations with one connection.

oBrain encodes the complete central nervous system of an adult female fruit fly (~169,088 neurons) into a smart contract on Arc, with each block as one moment of neural time, and now closes the loop to control Snake.

WorkBuddy's new full-stack web app development feature lets users describe an app in natural language and bundles domain, data, authentication, AI features and deployment, built on a wrapper of Tencent CloudBase.

3D generation tool Hyper3D Rodin can now be called by coding agents via MCP, with new users getting a $1 Creator plan and 10 regular credits.

Exa launched Snapshot, an index of 400 billion historical web page snapshots that lets users search past versions of the internet, for model backtesting and reinforcement learning.

Step 5 Preview is a 600B-parameter, 27B-active MoE model with 1M context and vision, aimed at agentic software engineering and finance tasks, available now in AI Studio and via API with weights planned for October 15.

Astra for Law will first open to select law firms through Trusted Access, usable in ChatGPT and Codex, with an API coming soon.

ChatGPT now includes 26 partner plugins and 47 community legal plugins, with partners including Thomson Reuters, Harvey, Legora and iManage.