The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) has quietly pushed a milestone: the AVM repository on GitHub now shows the release tag AV2 1.0.0, annotated with the brief note "First release version of AV2." Think of this as a public SW baseline rather than a finished product. AV2 is presented as the follow-up to AV1 and the project’s first software implementation that targets improved media compression. Promises of better efficiency are already being made, but real-world change will depend on HW support — e.g., GPU and server encoders/decoders — which is likely years away.