New DeepSeek & Gemini, Wan 2.5, Alibaba Dominates AI

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This week in AI was relentless. The landscape shifted fast: open-source breakthroughs, billion-parameter multimodal models, and new tools that blur the lines between text, image, audio, and video. In a rapid-fire update from AI Search, an incredible slate of releases landed — from Alibaba’s aggressive rollouts to novel video-from-3D pipelines, powerful vision models, and humanoid robot brains learning to adapt like never before.

If you’re a CIO, CTO, product leader or executive in Canada wondering what these announcements mean for your organization, this article unpacks the technical highlights, business implications, risks, and practical next steps. We’ll translate the hype into actionable insight for Canadian teams in Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal and beyond.

Table of Contents

Quick takeaways: What every Canadian executive must know

  • Multimodal models are accelerating adoption: Alibaba’s Qwen family (Max, Omni, VL, Image Edit, Coder) consolidated serious multimodal capabilities — text, image, audio and video — into efficient, usable releases that are often open or accessible via hosted platforms.
  • Video generation matured: New approaches like VideoFrom3D and ByteDance’s Links (Lynx) let creators generate expressive, controllable video from a single image plus 3D motion input or a reference photo — and some are open-source.
  • Robotics leaps forward: Unitree’s G1 and the Skilled AI generalist brain show robots learning agile balance and cross-platform adaptability, pointing toward accelerated automation in logistics, inspection and field services.
  • Open-source tools are everywhere: From DeepSeek Terminus to HunYuan 3D Part and Qwen3 variants, many of these models and demo repos are available on GitHub and Hugging Face, lowering the barrier to experimentation.
  • Ethics, compliance and Canadian policy matter: Generative video, deepfakes, and multimodal models require a balanced compliance approach — PIPEDA, provincial privacy rules, and potential federal AI governance need to be front-of-mind in deployment.

Why this week feels different

Two trends became especially clear. First, high-quality multimodal functionality that was previously siloed is converging into unified models that accept text, images, audio and even video as both inputs and outputs. Second, openness: several serious models are released with usable inference code or developer APIs — often under permissive licenses. For Canadian innovators, that means faster prototyping cycles, a lower cost of entry, and a chessboard of strategic decisions: build internal capabilities or lean on hosted services?

Below I unpack the most consequential releases, with plain-English explanations, concrete Canadian business use-cases, technical constraints, and governance considerations.

VideoFrom3D — a new paradigm for controlled video generation

At its core, VideoFrom3D introduces a hybrid workflow: you feed the model a style reference image (the texture/finish you want) and a moving 3D model (the motion and camera path). The model maps style onto the 3D geometry and synthesizes a photorealistic or stylized video sequence. The result: precise camera control, consistent surface detail, and more reliable geometric coherence than prior text-to-video tools.

How it works (high level)

  • Sparse Anchor View Generation (SAG): The model generates a few high-quality anchor frames derived from the 3D motion and style reference. These act as reliable references across time.
  • Geometry-Guided Generative In-Betweening (GGI): The model then interpolates frames between anchors using geometry cues from the 3D model, producing smooth temporal coherence and robust scene continuity.

Why this matters: typical generative tools hallucinate geometry and texture across frames, especially during camera motion. VideoFrom3D reduces that risk by explicitly using a 3D scaffold — giving production teams reliable renders with direct camera control.

Business applications for Canadian teams

  • Architecture and real estate: Toronto and Vancouver developers can generate timed walkthroughs or marketable visualizations without a full CG pipeline.
  • Marketing and media agencies: Precise camera control enables high-quality short ads, product shots, and immersive creatives at a fraction of production cost.
  • Gaming and simulation: Indie studios in Montréal or the GTA can prototype cinematic sequences with stylistic effects rapidly.

Deployment & constraints

VideoFrom3D is available on GitHub with instructions to run locally. Expect significant GPU memory needs for high-resolution renders; however, because the pipeline relies on a 3D asset as input, teams without 3D capability will need to integrate a 3D modelling resource or use photogrammetry to derive meshes.

ByteDance’s Links (sometimes referenced as Lynx) is a reference-to-video generator: upload a single photo of a subject, provide a prompt describing motion and behavior, and generate dynamic, expressive video of that person performing the scene. The outputs are noticeably better than earlier systems like Phantom and Stand-in across face fidelity, expression control, and prompt following.

“You can get them to do a lot more complex stuff … talking and expressions and hand gestures.” — AI Search

Why this is a watershed

Previously, persona cloning models produced slow portrait-style outputs with limited motion. Links elevates expressiveness — hand gestures, rapid expression changes, and higher fidelity face preservation — which expands use-cases but also amplifies the deepfake risk envelope.

Canadian business relevance

  • Content studios and influencers: Recreate talent for multilingual promos or generate localized spokespeople with minimal shoot costs.
  • Training and L&D: Personalized customer training videos using cloned instructors for role-play scenarios (with consent and robust rights management).
  • Advertising: Rapid campaign iterations with consistent talent faces across multiple scripts and locales.

Open-source advantage & legal guardrails

Links is released under Apache 2 — commercial use is permitted under this license. However, Canadian organizations must implement consent workflows, identity verification, and usage logs to satisfy corporate compliance and privacy obligations under PIPEDA and provincial statutes. Consider adding provenance watermarks or metadata to outputs to help identify AI-generated assets.

Hunyuan3D-Part: automated 3D segmentation and part reconstruction

Tencent’s Hunyuan3D-Part delivers two complementary tools: P3-SAM for point-cloud segmentation and XPart for reconstructing individual parts into complete 3D objects. The pipeline ingests an existing 3D mesh, converts it to a point cloud, segments it into semantically meaningful parts (shirt, cape, helmet), and then regenerates each part as a complete shape.

Why that matters: if you want to decompose complex characters or machinery into editable subcomponents (for modeling, animation, or manufacturing), Hunyuan3D-Part automates what used to be painstaking manual work.

Where Canadian industry benefits

  • Manufacturing & CAD: Automotive or aerospace suppliers can accelerate reverse engineering of legacy parts for refurbishment or inspection.
  • Animation and VFX: Studios can explode models into editable parts for rigging and texture workflows.
  • Heritage and museums: Digitization projects in Ottawa or Québec can segment scanned artifacts for conservation and replication.

Accessibility and tooling

Tencent provides a Hugging Face demo and GitHub repos for both tools. For production usage, evaluate the outputs for edge completeness and post-process with human-in-the-loop editing. This is a pragmatic augmentation rather than a full replacement of experienced modelers.

NVIDIA Lyra: single-image and video-to-3D scene reconstruction

NVIDIA’s Lyra converts images or short videos into coherent 3D scenes — and if you feed it video, it produces 4D reconstructions (3D over time). The team highlights use-cases in autonomous driving simulation and content generation, and publishes code on GitHub for researchers and enterprise developers.

Potential Canadian applications

  • Autonomous vehicle & mobility labs: Lyra can accelerate synthetic dataset creation for Toronto-based AV pilots by reconstructing street scenes from dashcam feeds.
  • Urban planning and municipal services: Simulate proposed infrastructure changes with realistic 3D reconstructions of existing corridors.
  • Media production: Transform historic photographs into immersive environments for documentaries and streaming media projects.

Technical considerations

Lyra’s published notes indicate heavy GPU requirements — H100s or A100s with 80GB of VRAM are recommended. Offloading to host RAM is possible but still demanding; organizations should plan for cloud GPU or enterprise GPU clusters. For Canadian SMEs, partnering with HPC providers or cloud GPU resellers in Canada (Azure Canada Central, AWS Canada, or Google Cloud) mitigates this constraint.

DeepSeek 3.1 Terminus: open-source intelligence rising

DeepSeek’s latest, 3.1 Terminus, is an open-source model that climbed the intelligence leaderboards for open-source LLMs. The model shows marked improvements in language consistency and agentic performance. Benchmarks like GPQ-8 Diamond (graduate-level science), Humanity’s Last Exam, and software engineering suites show genuine advances.

On independent leaderboards, DeepSeek 3.1 Terminus ties with other leading open-source offerings in intelligence metrics — signaling that open research groups are closing the gap with proprietary labs.

Implications for Canadian adopters

  • Cost-effective internal agents: DeepSeek is an option for on-premise conversational agents where data residency is a hard requirement.
  • Custom knowledge bases: Canadian regulatory environments often require hosting sensitive data locally; open models like DeepSeek let enterprises run inference behind corporate firewalls.
  • Developer ecosystems: Local AI consultancies and startups can fine-tune and productize DeepSeek-based tooling for verticals like fintech or healthcare, where privacy is paramount.

OmniInsert by ByteDance: insert anything into any video

OmniInsert tackles the hard problem of inserting a new character or object into an existing video so that it blends seamlessly with lighting, motion and occlusions. Give it a photo and a prompt like “insert a man kissing the woman” and the tool predicts plausible motion and compositing.

Why OmniInsert improves on previous tools

Compared to earlier attempts, OmniInsert demonstrates stronger temporal consistency and more accurate object insertion — even matching lighting and sample occlusions. That’s crucial for post-production and marketing where compositing realism matters.

Use-cases for Canadian media and enterprise

  • Advertising agencies: Insert brand mascots or product models late in post-production, reducing reshoot costs.
  • Training and simulation: Add digital extras to safety videos and drills without real actors.
  • Gaming cinematics: Combine user footage with branded characters for live events and promotions.

Ethical guardrails

Powerful video editing tools require governance: access controls, usage policies, and explicit consent from any depicted people. In Canada, consider data governance frameworks to log approvals, store consent records, and avoid unauthorized likeness use.

Gemini 2.5 Flash/FlashLite update: Google’s efficiency push

Google quietly updated Gemini to version 2.5 Flash and FlashLite with improved instruction-following, faster response times and stronger multimodal translation and reasoning capabilities. The update is already available through Google’s AI Studio, providing free access for experimentation.

What this means for businesses

  • Faster prototyping: AI Studio lets teams experiment with large models without heavy infrastructure investment.
  • Translation and multilingual support: Enhanced translation quality is valuable for Canadian organizations operating in bilingual markets (English/French) and serving multicultural customer bases.
  • Integration considerations: Hosted models are convenient but pose data residency and IP concerns; evaluate inputs and outputs before integration into production workflows.

Unitree and Skilled AI: robots getting nimble and adaptive

Two robotic demos illustrate the pace of progress. Unitree’s G1 humanoid demonstrates astonishing balance and recoverability — righting itself faster than most humans could. Separately, Skilled AI released a “generalist brain” trained across massive simulated bodies; the brain adapts to different morphologies (quadrupeds, bipeds, wheeled robots) and recovers from severe impairments like removed or altered legs.

Why this matters to Canadian industry

  • Logistics and warehousing: Humanoid and quadruped robots with robust balance unlock new automation options for Canadian distribution centers, especially in remote or constrained environments.
  • Utilities & inspection: Adaptive brains can be deployed to evolving robot configurations for pipeline inspection, hydro infrastructure inspection, or telecom maintenance.
  • R&D opportunities: Canadian universities and labs can collaborate with robotics startups to integrate generalist control stacks into local innovation projects.

Ethical and workforce implications

Automation displaces tasks, not necessarily jobs. Canadian organizations should plan re-skilling pathways and pilot hybrid human-robot teams to augment capabilities responsibly. Policymakers and business leaders must align on workforce development strategies to capture productivity gains while protecting livelihoods.

Alibaba week: Wan2.5, Qwen 3 family, and aggressive multimodal strategy

Alibaba’s announcements dominated the week. Their releases span a broad stack: Wan2.5 (a text/image-to-video generator with native audio), Qwen 3 Max (a powerful text model), Qwen 3 Omni (a true multimodal model), Qwen3 VL (a state-of-the-art vision-language model), Qwen Image Edit (a Nano Banana competitor), and Qwen3 Coder (an efficient coding assistant). The breadth and polish of these releases are remarkable, with an emphasis on end-to-end usability.

Wan2.5: video generation with native audio

Wan2.5 can generate video and audio synched natively — a big step forward in reducing lip-sync artifacts. The tool is accessible on Alibaba’s One.Video platform, supports up to 1080p and 10-second outputs, and provides free trial credits. Because audio synthesis is integrated, dialogue prompts produce tighter visual and acoustic alignment than audio-overlaid methods.

Business opportunities

  • Customer support and sales: Generate short explainer videos or multilingual spokesperson clips without on-camera talent.
  • Internal comms: Localize CEO messages or training snippets at scale for distributed Canadian teams.
  • Product demos: Rapidly prototype how new products look in different scenarios and markets.

Qwen3 Max & Qwen3 Omni: text-first and multimodal powerhouses

Qwen3 Max shines on text benchmarks (math, science, code) and compares favorably to leading proprietary models like Claude Opus and GPT-5 variants on certain suites. Qwen3 Omni integrates text, images, audio and video for both input and output, enabling dialogues via speech and camera streams. These models are accessible via web interfaces like Qwen Chat and come with developer APIs.

Why businesses should care

Qwen3 Omni’s ability to consume a 30-minute audio file and respond within milliseconds is game-changing for meeting summarization, contact centres, and localization pipelines. For Canada’s bilingual and multicultural workforce, fast multimodal transcription and translation can improve accessibility and productivity.

Qwen3 VL: a standout vision-language model

Qwen3 VL is the new heavyweight for visual reasoning. It can identify brands, zoom into image regions, conduct web searches, and autonomously gather information to answer questions — all with impressively accurate bounding boxes and OCR. Benchmarks show Qwen3 VL often outscoring other leading vision models across multiple tests.

Real-world Canadian examples

  • Retail & e-commerce: Photographic product ingestion pipelines can benefit from automated brand, feature and meta-tagging at scale.
  • Insurance claims: Visual damage assessment and structured extraction from images accelerate claims processing.
  • Public sector: Early adoption for heritage digitization and city planning workflows.

Qwen Image Edit (Nano Banana competitor)

Alibaba’s free, open-source image editor competes with Nano Banana and S- Dream for quality and control. It supports pose skeleton inputs and has built-in control-net-like capabilities, enabling high-fidelity editing of characters and scenes.

Qwen3 Coder

An efficient coding model with SUI bench scores rivaling larger closed-source models. Qwen3 Coder excels at generating complete interactive web previews and standalone HTML outputs — making it a practical tool for rapid prototyping at Canadian agencies and internal product teams.

Open-source, efficiency, and market strategy

Alibaba’s approach is strategic: ship usable hosted demos, publish models and repos, and encourage developer experimentation. For Canadian businesses, this means more high-quality options beyond the big U.S. cloud providers. Evaluate commercial terms, data residency, and API SLAs carefully before adopting.

Suno v5: better audio generation, faster production

Suno’s v5 focuses on music and vocal generation. The update emphasizes consistent voices and instruments across tracks, improved structural coherence, and dramatically faster generation times. Sample tracks show expressive, human-like vocals and more coherent song structures compared to earlier versions.

Use-cases for Canadian companies

  • Music production & advertising: Create royalty-free music beds and custom jingles for campaigns across Canada’s markets.
  • Game audio: Indie studios can prototype music and voice tracks quickly for in-game use or concept pitches.
  • Educational content: Generate spoken-word audio in multiple styles for e-learning modules.

Commercial considerations

Suno’s latest features live behind paid tiers. Evaluate licensing terms for commercial use and ensure any generated lyrics or samples do not unintentionally reproduce copyrighted material.

Kimmy (Kimi) OK Computer: turn prompts into autonomous agents

Kimmy launched “OK Computer” — an agentic mode that autonomously executes multi-step tasks (web research, content creation, deployment) within a sandbox environment. With a single prompt, OK Computer can gather sources, create slide decks, deploy content and return a shareable link — all without constant human direction.

Why agents are relevant to Canadian enterprises

  • Research & competitive intelligence: Speed up market scans and produce structured deliverables with source links.
  • Marketing automation: From research to deployment, agencies can reduce time-to-creative.
  • Internal knowledge workers: Free up senior teams by offloading routine content synthesis and prototyping to agents (with oversight).

Risks & governance

Autonomous agents require strict guardrails: source validation, browsing constraints, data handling policies, and human approval checkpoints. Canadian teams should include legal and privacy officers when deploying agents that fetch or synthesize external content.

OpenAI: ChatGPT Pulse — proactive AI updates

OpenAI released “ChatGPT Pulse” — a feature designed to proactively push personalized research and suggestions to users based on their goals, calendar and email. Built-in feedback loops allow the assistant to refine personalization over time. Currently, Pulse is available to Pro subscribers on mobile.

Practical advice for Canadian adopters

  • Information management: Pulse could be useful for executive summaries and digesting large volumes of domain-specific content.
  • Data security: Connecting to Gmail and calendars introduces data handling challenges; enterprise teams should confirm how data flows to the model and whether logs persist.
  • Cost-benefit: Evaluate whether Pro-level costs yield net productivity gains for leaders and high-value knowledge workers.

OmniHuman 1.5: lip-sync animation reaches terrifying fidelity

OmniHuman 1.5 offers one of the most realistic single-image-to-video lip-sync animators today. Upload a headshot and an audio clip; the model animates expression, head movement and contextual gestures aligned with the audio — and it understands context, not just phonemes.

“Not only does it animate the lips and face, but it also understands the context of your audio … when he mentions the blue pill, he holds up the blue pill.” — AI Search

Applications and risks

  • High-fidelity demos: Advertising and content can benefit from convincing spokesperson recreations.
  • Security & reputation: The dual-use nature raises serious brand risk if misused. Corporations must tightly control assets and consent policies.
  • Regulatory scrutiny: Deepfake laws and identity protection frameworks are evolving — Canada’s Digital Charter and potential AI governance regimes may impose constraints soon.

Putting it together: strategic recommendations for Canadian organizations

The parade of new capabilities invites a practical playbook. Here are prioritized steps for Canadian technology leaders to turn this week’s advances into competitive advantage while managing risk.

1. Run targeted pilots — fast and focused

  • Choose one business domain (marketing, customer support, claims processing) and pilot high-impact tools like Qwen3 Omni or Wan2.5 for creative prototypes.
  • Set short timelines (2–6 weeks) and measurable KPIs (production time saved, quality scores, conversion lift).

2. Prioritize data residency & privacy

If your domain handles sensitive customer data or health records, opt for on-prem or private-cloud deployments of open-source models (DeepSeek, Qwen variants) or negotiate enterprise terms that guarantee Canadian data locality.

3. Build an ethics and provenance framework

  • Mandate consent for any generated likeness.
  • Embed detection metadata or invisible watermarks in synthetic media.
  • Maintain an approvals registry for generated assets to audit decisions.

4. Upskill and reskill your workforce

Automation is not a fire-and-forget replacement. Establish reskilling programs for employees likely to be augmented by these tools. Invest in AI literacy workshops for managers and product owners to understand capabilities and limitations.

5. Invest in compute strategy and vendor negotiation

Many models require significant GPU capacity. Negotiate flexible cloud GPU contracts with Canada-based providers or explore partnerships with universities and HPC providers to access H100/A100 resources when needed.

6. Monitor regulation and public perception

Canadian policy is evolving. Track federal AI guidance and privacy rulings and lead public transparency initiatives when launching synthetic media to maintain trust.

Technical checklist for experimentation

  • Confirm GPU availability and expected VRAM (Lyra and some diffusion-based video tools need 40–80GB VRAM).
  • Check licenses: Apache 2 allows broad commercial use; proprietary models require enterprise agreements.
  • Run integration security scans for any hosted model connecting to enterprise systems (SSO, secret management).
  • Plan for content moderation and human-in-the-loop review for generated media.

Case study ideas for immediate pilots

  1. Retail product launch (Toronto-based apparel brand)Pilot: Use Qwen Image Edit and VideoFrom3D to generate a short product teaser for a new jacket, with different seasonal backgrounds and an animated 3D model walkthrough. Metrics: A/B test CTR on localized ads versus traditionally produced video.
  2. Insurance claims automation (national insurer)Pilot: Leverage Qwen3 VL to extract structured damage metrics from customer photos and Lyra for 3D reconstruction of small vehicle incidents for virtual assessment. Metrics: Reduction in manual adjuster time and time-to-settlement.
  3. Internal comms personalization (multinational with HQ in Montréal)Pilot: Use Wan2.5 to generate CEO video messages in multiple languages, and OmniInsert for quick scene updates. Metrics: employee engagement and localization cost savings.

Governance & legal: a Canadian checklist

  • Confirm whether any personal data is involved and apply PIPEDA principles for collection, purpose limitation and consent.
  • Document provenance for all synthetic media; consider cryptographic signing or watermarks to support authenticity claims.
  • Draft acceptable use policies for generative AI that cover deepfakes, likeness rights, and intellectual property considerations.
  • Include legal review in procurement for any hosted model that accesses sensitive data.

What to watch next

  • Regulatory developments in Canada on synthetic media and AI transparency.
  • Commercial licensing terms from major Asian providers — will they offer Canada-friendly data residency and enterprise SLAs?
  • Open-source community forks, which often enhance usability and privacy-first tooling for Canadian enterprises.
  • Hardware availability and pricing as demand from generative workloads increases.

Conclusion — an urgent call to action for Canadian leaders

We are at a pivotal moment. The week’s announcements illustrate a key point: high-quality AI is no longer the exclusive domain of a few giant labs. Powerful multimodal systems, efficient open-source alternatives, and production-ready video and audio tools are now available for businesses of every size. For Canadian organizations, the opportunity is clear: accelerate responsible experimentation to capture strategic advantage, but pair that velocity with governance and privacy safeguards that respect our legal framework and cultural expectations.

Start small, de-risk fast, and align pilots to measurable business outcomes. Prioritize consent, provenance and workforce development as you scale. If you lead technology or product teams in Canada, this is the moment to decide how your organization will participate in — and shape — the next wave of AI-enabled products and services.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Which of these models should Canadian companies adopt first?

A: It depends on use-case. For visual tasks and product catalogs, Qwen3 VL and Qwen Image Edit are immediate candidates. For text-heavy agents and on-prem deployment, DeepSeek or Qwen3 Coder are good choices. For creative video and marketing, Wan2.5 and VideoFrom3D are worth piloting. Always align model selection with data residency and compliance requirements.

Q: Are these models available to run locally in Canada?

A: Many of the models discussed are released on GitHub or Hugging Face with instructions for local inference, including Qwen3 Omni (30B) and DeepSeek 3.1. Some models (Lyra for instance) have heavy GPU requirements. Smaller Canadian teams may prefer cloud GPUs or enterprise contracts with regional cloud providers offering Canadian data centers.

Q: What are the main legal and ethical risks for businesses using synthetic media?

A: Risks include unauthorized use of likeness, deepfakes, misinformation, and IP infringement. Canadian organizations must ensure consent, maintain an audit trail for synthetic asset generation, and adopt detection/watermarking strategies. Regulatory compliance (PIPEDA, provincial privacy laws) and emerging AI governance frameworks must be considered.

Q: How should Canadian SMEs prioritize investment in AI infrastructure?

A: Start with a hybrid approach: use hosted services for rapid prototyping, then move successful pilots to private-cloud or on-prem inference when data sensitivity or scale demands it. Negotiate flexible compute arrangements and explore partnerships with local universities or cloud vendors for GPU access.

Q: Will these tools replace creative teams or developers?

A: Not immediately. Generative AI augments capabilities and accelerates iteration, but skilled humans remain critical for creative direction, quality assurance, and ethical oversight. Leaders should focus on re-skilling and role evolution rather than replacement.

Q: How can public sector organizations in Canada benefit?

A: Public sector bodies can use vision models for infrastructure planning, use multimodal transcription for accessible citizen services, and employ robotics for remote inspections. However, public procurement must emphasize privacy, transparency, and accountable AI to maintain public trust.

Final prompt for readers and Canadian leaders

The AI wave is here — disruptive, fast-moving, and full of opportunity. Which of these tools will you pilot first? Will you build with open-source models behind your firewall, or will you accelerate with hosted multimodal services? Share your plans with peers, consult your legal and privacy teams, and start a one-month pilot to test real impact. The future is not coming — it’s already rolling through. Is your organization ready?

About the author

This analysis is adapted from coverage by AI Search and reimagined for Canadian Technology Magazine, with added Canadian context, governance guidance, and strategic recommendations for enterprise leaders, IT directors and innovators across Canada.

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