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OpenAI Discontinues Sora for New "Spud" Model as GigaChat Releases Massive 702B Weights

Major Strategic Shifts at OpenAI

OpenAI Completes "Spud" Model and Discontinues Sora App: OpenAI has finished pretraining a powerful new model codenamed "Spud" while simultaneously announcing the discontinuation of the Sora video generation app and API. The company is pivoting Sora's research toward long-term world simulation and robotics and has renamed its product organization to "AGI Deployment" to reflect rapid development progress.

New Open-Weights Model Releases

Sberbank Releases GigaChat-3.1 Open-Weights Models: The GigaChat-3.1-Ultra-702B and GigaChat-3.1-Lightning-10B-A1.8B models have been released under the MIT license. These models, pretrained from scratch, target high-resource environments and local inference respectively, showing competitive benchmarks against DeepSeek and Qwen3.

Omnicoder v2 Released for Coding Tasks: Omnicoder v2 has been launched as an improved version of the previous coding-specific AI model. The release includes a GGUF version on Hugging Face, designed for efficient local execution of programming-related tasks.

AI Product Features & Updates

Mistral Introduces Home Screen Voice Widget: Mistral has released a new voice widget that allows users to initiate its AI voice mode directly from their device's homescreen. This feature aims to provide a more seamless and accessible alternative to traditional mobile assistants like Siri.