RIFTRUNNER: The Secret New AI Everyone Thinks Is Gemini 3

Google just triggered the wildest week in AI without saying a single word. A mysterious model called Riftrunner suddenly appeared on LM Arena with zero announcement, no docs, and no hint from Google — and the entire AI community froze to figure out what they were seeing. Early testers say it reads messy handwriting better than GPT-5, hits SoTA vision levels, and carries the same style as the hidden Gemini 3 checkpoints. At the same time, ByteDance dropped a coding model priced like a cup of coffee, OpenAI pushed out GPT-5.1 with a huge personality shift, and Black Forest Labs quietly moved Flux 2 Pro into internal preview. Everything is moving fast, and this breakdown covers all the shocks hitting the AI world right now.
Credit to : AI Revolution