Nine Model Entries In One Week. Only Some Actually Shipped. The Distinction Is Everything.
A tracker for early August 2026 logged nine dated entries across five calendar days in the first week of the month. These came from four model vendors, one image-and-video lab, and one regulator. The tracker's key contribution is a status column distinguishing what actually shipped from what was merely announced from what appeared only as a price on a third-party marketplace.
The mental model here is shipment versus announcement versus listing. In a mature market, the list of new models is noise. The signal is the status column. The mechanism is provenance tracking. You must verify whether a vendor released weights or APIs, whether they issued a press release, or whether someone simply listed a price on an inference marketplace. Nine entries sounds like progress. Nine entries where three shipped, four were announced, and two were prices on someone else's platform is a very different week. Teach yourself to ask not what was released but in what sense it was released.
Digital Applied, the publisher of the tracker, maintaining a dated ledger that separates shipped models from announced models from marketplace price listings. Four model vendors, one image-and-video lab, and one regulator contributed entries in the first week of August 2026.
- Open Hugging Face's model page at huggingface.co/models and sort by recently added. Pick any three models that appear new.
- For each model, check whether it has downloadable weights, a live demo, or only a model card. Write down which of the three actually shipped versus which are announcements.
- Cross-reference one model name against the vendor's own website or blog. If the vendor has not published a release post, the model likely did not ship in any meaningful sense. You have now built your own miniature status column.