It’s been a big week of updates with many additional updates and enhancements coming over the next few weeks. Please check out our beta group on Discord if you’d like to participate in early testing of our new features.

Model Updates

Thank you to the community for all the helpful feedback after our new model paradigm launched. We will always refine our offering and your opinions are immensely helpful. We've decided to make a couple model changes.

• Llama4 Maverick (aka Venice Large) is being retired May 12th
  Zuck failed us on this one and it needs to go. It has been replaced with the new Qwen3 235B as our Venice Large model. The Venice beta users have been enjoying it, almost universally prefering it to Maverick.
  

• Llama 3.2 3B (aka Venice Small) is also being retired.
  This model had a good run, but a plainly superior option exists now. The new Qwen3 4B will replace it as our Venice Small model. Beta users also very positive on this one. Both of the retiring models will remain in the app+api for 2 weeks under their own names. Maverick will then be taken out to pasture, removed from both app+api. Llama 3.2 3B will leave the app, and remain in API for some time.
  

• Deepseek retirement has been postponed to May 30th
  Additionally, we’ve heard your feedback RE: Deepseek’s retirement and we’re thinking through options. The retirement for Deepseek has now been moved to May 30th and we’ll provide another update before then.
  

• Inpainting Deprecation
  We are re-engineering Venice’s in-painting feature set to better serve the use cases we’ve now seen from our users. We are going to deprecate the current version from the app and the API next Monday while we work on the new release.
  
  In the interim, we encourage users to experiment with Venice’s “Enhance image” feature which can create neat re-creations of images.

App

• We've released an update that should alleviate grammatical errors and missing characters from longer conversations, most notably on 405B. If you continue to see those issues, please use the report conversation feature. Thank you for the existing reports -- they were very helpful in tracking down the issue.

• Updated the Report Conversation feature to allow for self reported categorization of the issues. This helps our team identify trends and issues with models faster.

• Added a Reasoning toggle for reasoning models that support enabling or disabling thinking responses.

• Added a warning within the chat input for users who have increased temperature into bounds known to create gibberish / garbage responses.

• Updated the Venice system prompt to reduce likelihood of Venice referencing details about itself in responses unless prompted about Venice.

• Streamlined the share chat functionality to immediately copy the share URL to the clipboard vs. requiring a second click.

• Updated the UI to disable the upscale / enhance button if both upscale was turned off and enhance was disabled.

• Updated the UI to only copy the user’s prompt when copying prompt + images messages.

• Updated the UI to view image options when viewing image variants in grid format.

• Fixed a bug where non-pro users were unable to upload documents or images for analysis.

• Fixed a bug when editing messages containing code blocks that would result in certain characters being improperly escaped.

• Ensure full EXIF / ICC profile is maintained when using the upscale / enhance feature. Fixes this Featurebase request which had two [1] [2] new reports.

API

• Security Notice - Fixed a bug reported via our bug bounty program that permitted API keys marked as inference only be able to manipulate the API key admin endpoint. This would have permitted these inference only keys to add, or remove other API keys. Please validate active API keys created between April 22nd, 2025 and May 7th, 2025 to ensure their validity.

• Explorer Tier Deprecation - As Venice continues its growth, we’re seeing our API usage reaching all-time highs. Following our announcement last month, we have changed our Pro account API access.
  
  Previously, Pro users had unlimited access to our Explorer Tier API with lower rate limits. We have now deprecated the Explorer Tier, and all new Pro subscribers will automatically receive a one-time $10 API credit when they upgrade to Pro –double the credit amount compared to competitors.
  
  This credit provides substantial capacity for testing and small applications, with seamless pathways to scale via VVV staking or direct USD payments for larger implementations. This change reflects our API’s maturation from its beta to the enterprise-ready service that developers are increasingly building on the API.

• Ensure full EXIF / ICC profile is maintained when using the upscale / enhance feature. Fixes this Featurebase request which had two [1] [2] new reports.

• Add support for OpenAI Embedding names to the Embeddings API via Model Compatibility Mapper.

• We've released an update that should alleviate grammatical errors and missing characters from longer conversations, most notably on 405B. If you continue to see those issues, please use the report conversation feature. Thank you for the existing reports -- they were very helpful in tracking down the issue.

• Add support for JSON payload to Upscale / Enhance API - API docs are updated - Postman example.

• Fixed a bug that caused the created field on the OpenAI compatible image generations API to ensure it's coming back as an int and not a float.

• Fixed a bug causing model_feature_suffix features from properly updating their respective flags. Added additional test coverage to ensure this avoids a regression.

Token

• Updated the token dashboard coloring.

• Redirect identifiable mobile wallets to the token dashboard when accessing https://venice.ai and hide the PWA installation modal.

Characters

• Updated Character UI with imports and rating stats on the primary character cards.

• Added a UI feature to show which source character a user’s character was cloned from.