The AI Image and Video Models That Defined the First Half of 2026

The pace of generative AI has a way of making six months feel like five years, and the first half of 2026 was exactly that kind of stretch. Image models crossed into genuinely production-grade territory, video models picked up native audio and real camera control, and the distance between "AI-generated" and "agency-grade" closed faster than most teams could keep up with. Here's the timeline — and where it's headed next.

Hedra Avatar set the bar for spokesperson content

We'll start close to home. Following the success of Character 3, Hedra Avatar raised the ceiling on what a talking-head model can do: next-generation lip-sync that holds up at close range, paired with camera control that turns a single portrait and an audio track into a directed, on-camera performance. For marketing and go-to-market teams that is the whole game — a spokesperson, an explainer, a product walkthrough, generated rather than filmed, with the lip-sync and framing that make it read as real.

The video models that raised the bar

The year opened on the video side. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 arrived as a genuinely multimodal system — text, image, video, and audio in; cinematic sequences with native sound and precise camera control out — and reset expectations for how much a single generation could hold together.

Kling V3 from Kuaishou followed in February with multi-shot sequences, complex physics, native audio, and accurate lip-sync across up to fifteen seconds of footage — the continuity that used to mean stitching clips together by hand. A single prompt produced this cinematic Roman café scene, down to the rising steam and the foot traffic behind, rendered in roughly two minutes.

Alibaba's Happy Horse rounded out the video surge with unusually stable physics and synchronized audio — multilingual lip-sync and Foley included — across text-, image-, and video-driven workflows.

The image models that took a leap

On the image side, Google set the pace. Nano Banana Pro and its high-speed sibling Nano Banana 2 are, frankly, the best general-purpose models available right now for character rendering — consistent faces, hands, and identity across prompts, grounded in real-world knowledge.

That makes them ideal inputs for a Hedra Avatar performance: render a consistent character or spokesperson in Nano Banana, then bring it to life with lip-sync and camera control. The speed is real, too — this running-shoe ad went from a flat desk snapshot to finished commercial creative in about 29 seconds.

OpenAI's GPT Image 2 landed in April with native 4K output and, at last, text rendering you can actually trust across both Latin and CJK scripts — closing a gap that had quietly held image models back in any workflow where the typography is the deliverable. This luxury fragrance hero shows it off: a crisp, legible label and light reading cleanly through the glass.

ByteDance's BytePlus arm answered with Seedream 5.0 Lite, notable less for raw fidelity than for built-in web retrieval — it can pull live, real-world information into a generation, which matters more than it sounds for anyone producing topical or on-brand creative.

What's coming next

The pace isn't slowing — if anything it's accelerating. There are credible rumors that ByteDance is already at work on a successor to Seedance 2.0, and that Google is close to an extra-fast variant of Nano Banana that trades a sliver of fidelity for the kind of speed that changes how teams ideate at volume. Both are expected in the next month or two — well before the end of the year.

When they arrive, they'll be on Hedra, alongside every other model that matters. Staying on top of the entire field, across every lab, has always been the point: not any single model, but the full range of tools that let people express themselves to their fullest.

With gratitude to the many engineers at Hedra who do the quiet work of bringing these models onto the platform — among them Jay Bhukhanwala, Brandon Halim, Mihai Toader, Aayush Suri, and Sakib Ahamed.