AI Models & Launches — May 11, 2026

This Monday morning, new AI models are making waves, from reducing costs to transforming shopping and even influencing AI behavior. Smallest.ai and Tenstorrent are partnering to slash voice AI infrastructure costs by 3.6 times, making production-quality audio more affordable for businesses. Their Lightning V2 text-to-speech model now runs on Tenstorrent hardware, marking the first production-grade system to match text token costs without sacrificing audio quality. This means on-premise voice AI