ElevenLabs vs MiniMax

ElevenLabs and SoundCloud Partner for AI Music Publishing

ElevenLabs announced that users can now publish AI-generated music from its ElevenMusic platform directly on SoundCloud. The integration makes SoundCloud the first platform to allow ElevenMusic creations to be shared beyond ElevenLabs' own ecosystem. As part of the partnership, SoundCloud Artist Pro users receive three months of ElevenMusic Pro, which includes up to 1,000 song generations, 500 stem splits, and five custom styles or vocals per month. Since launching its music models in 2025 and a consumer app in April 2026, ElevenLabs reports over 25 million tracks generated. SoundCloud has also embraced AI tools, recently partnering with Moises for song import/export. The move contrasts with platforms like Deezer and Bandcamp, which are filtering or banning AI-generated music, while Spotify and YouTube are labeling such content.

• ElevenLabs and SoundCloud partner to allow publishing AI-generated music directly on SoundCloud.
• SoundCloud Artist Pro users get three months of ElevenMusic Pro.
• Over 25 million tracks have been generated using ElevenLabs' music models.

Sequel Launches AI Agents Combining Website and Webinar Data

Sequel, a company that transforms webinars and video into a go-to-market engine, has announced the general availability of Sequel Agents, AI agents for webinar and video marketing powered by first-party audience context. These agents help marketing teams plan programs, create content, understand their audience, and act on engagement, extending the value of each webinar beyond the live broadcast. The agents use combined first-party website and video engagement data to publish recaps, adapt website experiences, and draft follow-ups. Customers can start with three types of agents (Build, Scale, Convert) or build custom agents. All agent workflows require human approval before sending emails, making changes, or pushing leads to CRM. ElevenLabs generated $14 million in attributed pipeline using the technology, and Unit21 automated 80% of post-webinar work.

• Sequel announced general availability of Sequel Agents for webinar and video marketing.
• Sequel Agents use first-party website and video engagement data to plan programs and create content.
• Customers can start with Build, Scale, and Convert agents or build custom agents.

Nvidia Releases New Open Transcription Model

Nvidia has released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a free, open-weight speech-to-text model that can transcribe audio in up to 40 languages and translate 31 languages to and from English. It supports recordings up to one hour long and can distinguish up to eight speakers. The company also released version 2 of its Granary open-source speech dataset. The model is targeted at developers building meeting transcription and medical transcription applications. It runs on a single chip, from edge devices like Jetson AGX Thor to datacenter Blackwell chips. Nvidia claims it beats rivals on benchmarks like Hugging Face's Open ASR Leaderboard. However, it only works with recorded audio, not live streams, leaving real-time use to competitors like ElevenLabs. The release comes amid a wave of voice AI model launches from Mistral, ElevenLabs, and Salesforce.

• Nvidia released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, an open-weight speech-to-text model supporting 40 languages.
• The model can translate 31 languages to and from English and handle recordings up to one hour long.
• Nvidia also released version 2 of its Granary open-source speech dataset.

Introducing MiniMax Code Mini App

MiniMax has launched Mini App inside its MiniMax Code desktop app for macOS and Windows. Mini Apps are long-running applications featuring a frontend and a Node.js backend that install as plugins, enabling persistent interaction with AI agents. The release includes the Mini App runtime, a /miniapp-creator chat tool, and an open-source community repository.

• Launched on October 22, 2026, for local sessions of the MiniMax Code desktop app across macOS and Windows.
• Mini Apps combine a frontend, a Node.js backend, and a miniapp.json manifest compatible with the MiniMax Plugin protocol.
• Includes /miniapp-creator, allowing users to generate and test working applications directly from chat prompts using automated queries and screenshot verification.

MiniMax M3.1 Flash: Redefining Agent Performance and Cost

Today, we officially roll out MiniMax M3.1 Flash. As a next-generation Flash model, M3.1 Flash delivers a generational leap in agentic tasks, coding, Computer Use and cybersecurity, while making online inference nearly three times faster and reducing usage costs by 70%.

AI News Roundup: Model Launches, Policy, and Infrastructure

This AI news digest from mid-October 2026 covers major model releases, policy updates, and infrastructure advancements. DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash 1017 is highlighted as an open-weight value leader, featuring a 552B-total/16B-active MoE architecture with a 1M-token context and MIT license. MiniMax launched M3.1 Flash, offering competitive pricing and high-speed performance. Inception introduced Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM achieving over 1,000 tokens per second. Meta unveiled Muse Wonder Full and Muse Glimmer, including a 30B open-weight agentic model. Policy developments include a potential Chinese export rule and a DHS ban on DeepSeek. Infrastructure updates feature vLLM v0.32.0. Anthropic's new Public Benefit Fund commits about 20% of equity to public good, and OpenAI hired Aleksander Madry for safety.

• DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 is a 552B-total/16B-active MoE model with MIT license, scoring 45 on AA Intelligence Index.
• MiniMax M3.1 Flash is priced at $0.15/$0.60 per million input/output tokens, with weights available Oct 23.
• Inception releases Mercury 3, a diffusion LLM with 1,000+ tok/s, available on Baseten.