ByteDance Upgrades Video AI Model to Seedance 2.5

Smallest.ai has raised $13 million in funding to develop voice AI models designed to conduct phone calls that pass the Turing test. The startup is focused on building ultra-fast voice models that sound genuinely human. The funding supports the company's effort to create AI capable of handling realistic voice interactions.

Chinese AI firm MiniMax announced H3, a new open-source video generation model, on Friday. The move marks MiniMax's first time open-sourcing its flagship video model, intensifying competition in the AI video space against rivals like ByteDance and Google. Open-sourcing the model represents a strategic shift to gain market share in a crowded sector.

Encore AI has raised $30 million to develop AI agents that learn from customer interactions. The startup analyzes calls, messages, and CRM data to extract effective sales techniques and convert them into playbooks that train AI agents. This approach aims to automate and scale sales processes by codifying human expertise.

Runway ML shared insights on building real-time AI video models at VB Transform 2026, revealing that the company turned a persistent avatar drift bug into a front-end feature rather than fixing it at the back-end. Head of enterprise product Ryan Phillips emphasized that robust AI product development requires cross-functional alignment on quality definitions, manual evaluation using simple tools like Excel spreadsheets, and leveraging language models to automate visual grading at scale. The company uses model distillation to achieve real-time latency for its Runway Characters product, which generates interactive video with AI avatars on the fly.