Sep 24, 2025
AI’s moving fast, but most headlines are either hype or half-baked. I’m Abe, COO at AI Advantage, and every week I break down what actually matters—no fluff, no fanboying, just what helps you move smarter at work and at home.
This week’s drop? Big moves from Alibaba, Altman, and a sneaky-useful Gemini + Luma hack you’ll want in your back pocket.
Alibaba Just Open-Sourced the Kitchen Sink
Abe’s take: While OpenAI drip-feeds releases like a Michelin tasting menu, Alibaba’s blasting a buffet of models onto the table. And you know what? Some of it looks real good.
What dropped:
Qwen-Max (1T parameters): Shows near-frontier ability in coding and agent workflows. The “Heavy” variant aced math reasoning.
Qwen-Omni: Multimodal beast. Reads and generates across text, images, audio, video. Supports 19 spoken languages, speaks in 10.
Qwen-VL: Outperforms even closed-source models on visual tasks—wild for open-source.
Also dropped:
Why this matters: Most US labs are stuck in safety review limbo. Meanwhile, Chinese labs like Alibaba are sprinting with release velocity. Qwen feels like the closest thing yet to China’s frontier moment since DeepSeek’s R1.
Scale AI Launches SEAL Showdown
Abe’s take: Benchmarks are broken if they only reflect one kind of user. Scale just threw a wrench into that system—and it’s about time.
What’s new:
SEAL Showdown is Scale’s answer to LMArena, but with real-world user voting, segmented by demographics like age, language, education.
Uses their global contributor network across 100 countries, 70+ languages.
Voters use models for free via Scale’s Playground app. Voting is optional and anonymized.
Data stays private for 60 days to avoid gaming the system.
Why this matters: Leaderboards don’t mean much if they don’t reflect how people actually use these models. SEAL gives us a better look at what works—for different kinds of users doing real tasks.
Altman’s Infrastructure Blog = Power Play
Abe’s take: Sam’s done playing nice. This is OpenAI going full AWS mode—and it changes the game.
Altman wants to build 1 gigawatt of compute weekly—an insane scale jump.
Says lack of compute is the bottleneck between curing cancer or enabling universal education.
Teases a major infrastructure rollout with new funding models to match.
Wants to “turn the tide” of countries outpacing the U.S. in chip and energy infrastructure.
Why this matters: With Nvidia investing $100B into OpenAI infra, this isn't a blog—it's a declaration. They’re building a future where compute isn’t the bottleneck. This shifts the conversation from "Which problem should we solve?" to "Why not solve all of them?"
Build Your Own Animated Figurine for Marketing
Abe’s take: This is the kind of low-lift creative hack AI was made for. And it actually works.
Go to Google Gemini, enable the Nano Banana tool.
Use this prompt:
Upload a photo of yourself or your product.
Take the output and bring it to Luma Dream Machine.
Animate it using prompts like:
Pro tip: Be specific with camera angles and movement. It’s what makes the difference between “cute” and “damn, that’s pro.”
IBM Shows AI’s Real ROI Inside the Enterprise
Abe’s take: Everyone talks about AI ROI. IBM’s actually doing it.
75% productivity gains in HR tasks
2.1M+ conversations automated per year
80+ tasks fully handled by AI—no humans needed
Why this matters: IBM isn’t just slapping AI on top of legacy processes. They’re rebuilding how departments function from the inside out. It’s the best case study so far for large-scale AI systemization—especially for ops-heavy teams.
6 Tools Worth Trying This Week
1. Qwen3 Model Variants (Alibaba)
Qwen-Max, Qwen-Heavy – near-frontier models for coding and reasoning.
Qwen-Omni – multimodal model (text, image, audio, video) with multilingual support.
Qwen-VL – top-tier visual model, open-source.
LiveTranslate-Flash – real-time AI translation tool.
Guard models – for safety moderation.
Upgraded Coder variants – dev-focused tools for AI-enhanced programming.
2. SEAL Showdown (Scale AI)
Model comparison and voting platform based on real human preferences, with demographic segmentation.
Lets users test models on Scale's Playground and vote.
3. Nano Banana (Google Gemini)
Tool for generating realistic figurine-style images from user photos.
Prompt used in article: “Create a 1/7th scale commercialized figurine... placed on a computer desk with a transparent acrylic base and toy packaging.”
4. Luma Dream Machine
AI animation tool that turns still images into short, cinematic motion sequences.
Useful for: Social media content, Marketing visuals, Product/character visualization
5. IBM HR Automation Tools
80+ HR tasks handled fully by AI.
2.1M+ automated conversations per year.
75% productivity gains in internal ops via AI.
6. HubSpot’s ChatGPT at Work Guide
A free guide that includes:
100+ ChatGPT prompts for work and ops
Practical industry workflows
AI troubleshooting tips
Productivity hacks
Want to stay ahead of AI — not the hype, just the real tech quietly changing how we live, work, and parent? Join our free AI Advantage community here: The AI Advantage Community — Thanks for reading, Abe.