OpenAI just briefly exposed three new image models in its API—aurora-red, green, and blue—before quickly pulling them, only for them to surface in blind Arena tests. Early runs show red prioritizing speed while green yields sharper detail, sparking speculation that GPT-Image-3 is around the corner. OpenAI has yet to release documentation or pricing.
xAI just rolled out Grok Imagine Video 1.5 across grok.com and its API, claiming the top spot on the Image-to-Video Arena leaderboard. Built on the autoregressive Aurora engine, it costs just $0.14 per second at 720p with native synchronized audio—roughly 86% cheaper than Sora 2 Pro. The catch is that output is currently capped at 720p.
Microsoft is doubling down on its flagship Earth-system AI model, Aurora. In partnership with the University of Cambridge, the company pledged to keep future releases and full training pipelines completely open-source, aiming to help local weather services and energy grids build tailored forecasting tools with minimal data.
Aurora just launched fully autonomous commercial freight runs on Texas public highways, clocking its first 1,200 driver-free miles for Uber Freight and Hirschbach. It marks the first commercial driverless trucking service operating on open roads, with plans to expand to Phoenix by late 2025.
Grok just rolled out a faster, sharper version of Grok-2 to everyone on X for free. The upgraded model runs three times faster with better accuracy and multilingual support, while bundling web search, citations, and the Aurora image model. Developers also get updated API endpoints at lower token pricing.
xAI just rolled out Aurora, a new autoregressive image generation model for Grok on X. Trained on billions of web examples, it tackles notoriously tough challenges like text rendering, logos, and photorealistic portraits, alongside native support for image editing inputs. It is now live in select countries and rolling out to all users within a week.
Uber is expanding its contractor model into AI data labeling through a new division called Scaled Solutions. The company is already hiring gig workers across the US, India, and Poland to handle training, testing, and localization tasks for clients like Aurora and Luma AI, turning one of tech's most tedious bottlenecks into its next ride-hailing style marketplace.
