We're releasing HeyGen Video, built for businesses that need production-quality video without production-level costs. Pricing starts at $0.01/s through October (50% off) Built on @Minimax_AI H3, post-trained by HeyGen. Learn more: https://developers.heygen.com/heygen-video-1.0-catalog

Grok Bot is now more powerful for building software. Bots can hand off coding tasks to Cursor, manage your PRs with GitHub and Origin plugins, and share video demos of what they build.

Computer now works in email. Send, forward, or cc computer@perplexity.com on any thread. Every email task runs as a normal session in Computer, viewable on web and mobile, with the same audit trail as any task in the app.

Introducing Boreal-H3 — a video model built for ads and our next step toward recursive self-improvement in video generation. A good-looking video isn’t enough. The product has to stay the same. The actor has to stay the same. The label has to be right. And the action in the brief actually has to happen. So we post-trained MiniMax H3 specifically for advertising. But this isn’t a one-off SFT or LoRA fine-tune. We built a closed-loop system that learns what to improve next. Human-calibrated evaluation diagnoses failures and guides the next intervention: targeted data collection, reinforcement learning, or inference optimization. When the feedback is unreliable, we revise the evaluator or reward—not just the generator. Every experiment feeds into shared memory, informing the next training decision. The model improves, and so does the process that produces its successor. The results: → 85.3% reference fidelity — highest among the frontier video generation models we evaluated → Brief success: 28% → 50% → Identity match: 83% → 94% → Visible defects per clip: down 70% → Generation time and estimated cost: down 20% Boreal-H3 doesn’t just make better-looking video. It makes more usable ads. Credit to the @MiniMax_AI team for the foundation we’re building on. This launch is a checkpoint, not the finish line. We’re building more than a better video model. We’re building a system that learns how to make the next one better.

Second question on AI. We are told repeatedly that AI is going to transform every aspect of our lives – jobs, productivity, inequality, science, communication, daily activities, social order, and politics, among others. But this promise (or threat) is coupled with the rhetoric that such an important technology, with all of the risks and competitive pressures that it entails, should be left to experts or to “technocracy” (perhaps construed broadly to include some regulators). These two statements are hard to reconcile in a democratic society. If anything is half as important as AI is said to be (and I agree, AI is potentially very important and transformative), then involving democratic voice is essential. If something will shape our future in a democratic society, then its direction is for democratic institutions to decide. My instinct is that democratic voice is essential, and relying too much on technocracy could be both dangerous and counterproductive. The counterargument that AI’s direction can and should be entrusted to technocracy would go something along the following lines. First, democratic decision-making has become imperiled in our age of polarization. Second, AI is sufficiently complex that most citizens won’t have a deep enough understanding to meaningfully contribute to the debate (and even to the question of what we want from AI). Third, competition between different labs, and perhaps competition between the US and China, creates enough discipline for a socially beneficial direction of AI to be adopted. Fourth, today’s AI leaders are enlightened and ethical enough that within the framework created by competition, they can be broadly trusted. There are many aspects of this counterargument that I do not find convincing. Taking them in order: polarization can be overcome, and big decisions and challenges sometimes bring societies together; in fact, delegating key decisions to technocracy without democratic input may diminish trust in institutions and experts, and may worsen polarization. Second, democratic voice does not require citizens to write code or design new models; the debate should be informative enough that citizens can weigh in about what type of future they want and how they trade off the costs and benefits of different options. Third, competition doesn’t seem to be a good disciplining framework; on the contrary, competition sometimes brings the worst out of both organizations and people. Fourth, if three decades of work on political economy and institutions has taught me anything, it is that we should not bank on the ethical grounding of unconstrained leaders. But, still, I do not mean to immediately dismiss the technocracy option if there are more compelling arguments for it. The question is, then, whether there are any circumstances under which such important decisions can be delegated to AI experts and technocracy. One final secondary question: even if we managed to get democratic input in the United States or even in Europe, AI will shape the lives of everyone on this planet. How do we ensure that the voice of nearly 6 billion people who don’t live in the US, Europe and China also contributes to the debates on AI?

GPT-6.1 Sol: near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price. It’s the most cost-efficient model for its performance available today.