Multimodal

Kuaishou's Kling AI Closes $2B Round at an $18B Valuation

Kling AI formally closed a $2 billion round led by General Atlantic on July 2, valuing the Kuaishou-backed video-generation company at $18 billion. The close confirms the process first disclosed in mid-June and ranks among the largest single rounds ever raised by a Chinese AI company ahead of an expected IPO.

Google Ships Gemini 3.5 Live Translate for Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Translation

Google's June AI roundup introduced Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, an audio model for live speech-to-speech translation that auto-detects more than 70 languages while preserving the speaker's natural intonation, targeting multilingual calls, meetings, and travel. The month also brought Nano Banana 2 Lite as Google's fastest image model and Gemini Omni Flash reaching APIs in public preview.

Gemini 3.5 Pro Enters Limited Vertex Preview with 2M-Token Context and Deep Think Reasoning

Google opened Gemini 3.5 Pro to select Vertex AI enterprise customers in limited preview in early June 2026, ahead of a broader GA Sundar Pichai described as 'next month' at Google I/O. The model targets a 2-million-token context window, Deep Think multi-step reasoning, and frontier multimodal understanding — absorbing the use cases previously routed to Gemini Ultra.

Ideogram Releases 4.0: First Open-Weight 9.3B Text-to-Image Model with Native 2K Output and JSON Layout Control

Ideogram released its first open-weight model — a 9.3-billion-parameter text-to-image diffusion transformer using a frozen Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct text encoder. Unlike prompt-based models, Ideogram 4.0 uses structured JSON bounding-box placement for pixel-precise layout control and generates natively at 2K resolution. Weights and Apache 2.0 inference code are on Hugging Face and GitHub; commercial deployment requires a separate license. It claimed #1 among all open-weight image models on DesignArena on launch day.

Cognition Launches Devin Desktop — Agent-Neutral IDE Built on Windsurf Rebrand with ACP Support

Cognition rebranded Windsurf as Devin Desktop, a full code editor and agent orchestration layer for engineering teams. The update introduces Devin Local (rewritten in Rust with 30% greater token efficiency), native support for the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP), and out-of-the-box integrations with OpenAI Codex, Claude Agent, and OpenCode. The move positions Cognition — which raised $1B at a $25B valuation in May 2026 — to compete directly with GitHub Copilot and Cursor at the IDE layer.

Alibaba Launches Qwen3.7-Plus — Multimodal GUI Agent Unifying Vision and Language

Alibaba released Qwen3.7-Plus, a multimodal agent model that unifies GUI and CLI operation across visual and text tasks in a single set of weights. On ScreenSpot Pro it scores 79.0% and Terminal-Bench 70.3%, leading the open-API GUI agent field. Available via Alibaba Cloud at $0.40/M input tokens with native vision for images and video up to 5 minutes.