Hey makers!
Welcome back to another week of Altern.
This issue is brought to you by: Dove, ClosedLoop AI, SceneMixer
There’s always something happening in AI, and keeping up with everything is becoming a job of its own.
We’ve got an especially interesting update this time: ChatGPT can now create animated GIFs. We’re also looking back at Week 44, with announcements from NVIDIA, Runway, n8n, and Anthropic.
And, of course, we’ve got five new BuildBoard winners to celebrate and a few great teams to thank for supporting Altern.
Here’s what caught our attention.
What’s New in AI?
Create GIFs with ChatGPT
On November 4, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Images 2.6, bringing something pretty fun to ChatGPT: the ability to create animated GIFs directly from a prompt.
You can describe what you want to animate, upload an existing image, or even start with a simple sketch. ChatGPT turns it into a looping animation that you can adjust and share.
You can also change the playback speed or ask ChatGPT to make changes to the animation.
The update comes with improvements to image generation, including faster results and better consistency when editing images.
What’s interesting is how simple the process is becoming.
Creating a small animation used to mean opening a design tool, putting together frames, and making sure everything looped properly.
Now you can just describe what you want.
For makers, this could be useful for creating animated product illustrations, social media content, website elements, or quick visual experiments.
It’s not going to replace every animation tool, but for simple creative tasks, it’s a pretty convenient addition.
GIF creation is rolling out in ChatGPT, so it may not appear for everyone immediately.
Read the official announcement
NVIDIA released Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe
On October 28, NVIDIA introduced Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe, a new open-weight model focused on speech recognition.
It supports 40 languages and handles things like transcription, translation, speaker identification, and word-level timestamps.
What’s interesting is that you can also give it natural-language instructions about how you want the audio transcribed.
That might sound like a small feature, but it could be pretty useful.
If you’ve ever worked on a transcription tool or a voice-powered app, you know how much work goes into getting the output just right.
Having more control over that process without training a custom model is a welcome improvement.
It’s also nice to see more open models entering the speech AI space.
Read more about Nemotron 3.5 Transcribe
Runway launched App Studio
Runway announced App Studio on October 26, giving users a way to create AI-powered creative apps by describing what they want to build.
Instead of starting with code, you can explain your idea in plain language and let the platform help put it together using Runway’s models and creative tools.
App Studio also supports uploaded files and brand assets, which could make it useful for creating more personalized experiences.
It’s available on paid plans.
We’ve seen a lot of tools trying to make app development more accessible lately, but Runway is approaching it from the creative side.
And that makes things interesting.
Not everyone building something useful wants to become a full-time developer. Sometimes you just have an idea for a tool and want to see whether it works.
Tools like this make those early experiments a little easier.
n8n introduced version 3.0 beta
On October 27, n8n announced the beta release of version 3.0.
This one isn’t about a big new AI model or a flashy feature.
Instead, the team is focusing on making the platform more reliable, secure, and easier to maintain.
The update includes stronger security defaults, changes to legacy functionality, and improvements that prepare n8n for future releases.
There are some breaking changes, so anyone already running n8n workflows should check the migration guidance before upgrading.
The stable release is planned for early December.
For people building AI agents and automations, this is worth paying attention to.
It’s easy to get excited about what an agent can do in a demo. Making that same workflow run reliably every day is a different challenge.
And that’s where the less exciting infrastructure work becomes really important.
Anthropic shared early progress on AI-assisted drug development
Anthropic published an update on its work in drug development on October 27.
The company has been collaborating with six organizations, including BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Enveda, and Generate Biomedicines.
The idea is to explore how Claude can help researchers with tasks like analyzing scientific information, planning experiments, and working through complicated biological questions.
It’s still early work, and much of it is happening at the preclinical stage.
But it’s an interesting direction.
We spend so much time talking about AI for writing, coding, and generating images that it’s easy to forget how many other fields could benefit from these tools.
Drug discovery is an especially difficult area, so even small improvements to research workflows could be valuable.
It’ll be interesting to see what comes out of these collaborations over time.
Read Anthropic’s research update
Altern BuildBoard: Week 44 Winners
Now for one of our favorite parts of the week.
Every week, makers launch their products on Altern BuildBoard, share what they’ve been working on, and get their ideas in front of the community.
Some projects are brand new. Others have been in development for months. Either way, putting something out there takes work, and we love seeing people do it.
Here are the five products that finished at the top of BuildBoard in Week 44.
🥇 · #1 · Supaslides — Turn your website into branded social media carousels with AI, without spending hours on design. — Supaslides on Altern
🥈 · #2 · showmyphoto — One of this week’s community favorites. Check out the project and what its team is building. — showmyphoto on Altern
🥉 · #3 · TermLink — Access and manage your AI coding-agent sessions from your browser, even when you’re away from your computer. — TermLink on Altern
🏅 · #4 · PI Labs — A collection of AI-powered Chrome extensions that make everyday tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini more useful. — PI Labs on Altern
🏅 · #5 · Timefold — Solve complex scheduling, planning, and resource optimization problems with smarter decision-making tools. — Timefold on Altern
Congratulations to all five winners!
And thank you to everyone who launched on BuildBoard last week.
We know how much work goes into building something, even when the final product looks simple.
Whether your launch finished in the top five or not, we hope you got some useful feedback, a few new visitors, or maybe even your next customer.
That’s what we’re trying to make easier with BuildBoard.
A Big Thank You to Our Sponsors
Before we wrap up, we want to give a proper thank-you to the teams supporting Altern this week.
Running a platform for makers takes time and resources, and having other product teams behind us means a lot.
Here are our three sponsors for Week 44.
💌 · Dove — An AI-powered email app that organizes your inbox, summarizes conversations, and helps you write replies so you can spend less time on email. — Dove on Altern
🛠️ · ClosedLoop AI — A shared workspace that helps developers and AI agents collaborate across planning, coding, and validation with the same context. — ClosedLoop AI on Altern
🎬 · SceneMixer — Turn scripts and novels into multi-episode AI video stories with tools for storyboarding, character consistency, generation, and editing. — SceneMixer on Altern
Thanks for Supporting Altern
To Dove, ClosedLoop AI, and SceneMixer: we really appreciate your support.
And to our readers, if any of these products sound interesting, take a moment to check them out.
Supporting independent teams doesn’t always mean buying something. Sometimes a visit, a bit of feedback, or sharing a product with someone who needs it can make a difference.
Keep Building, Keep Shipping
That’s it for this edition.
Another round of new AI tools, interesting research, and people turning ideas into actual products.
If there’s one thing we keep seeing, it’s that you don’t need to build something enormous to make something useful.
A small improvement to an everyday workflow can be a great product. So can a tool that solves a problem for a very specific group of people.
And sometimes the only way to find out whether an idea is worth pursuing is to put it out there.
So if you’ve been sitting on a project, maybe this is a good week to share it.
You can launch your AI product on Altern BuildBoard, discover what other makers are creating on Altern, or simply browse around for some inspiration.
You can also find us on X, GitHub, and LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading, for sharing your projects, and for being part of the community.
See you next week!
— The Altern Team