🔍 LLM DAILY

Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models

December 11, 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

• ElevenLabs has reached a $6.6B valuation, doubling its value in just nine months as the AI voice technology company expands beyond voice into new market areas with backing from major investors like Sequoia, ICONIQ, and a16z.

• Unsloth's new Triton kernels dramatically improve LLM training efficiency with 3-5x faster speeds and up to 90% reduction in VRAM requirements, allowing models like Qwen3-4B to be trained on as little as 3.9GB of VRAM without accuracy loss.

• The SCOPE framework introduces a breakthrough approach that distills LLM knowledge into student policies for hierarchical planning, eliminating the need for costly ongoing LLM queries during inference while maintaining comparable performance.

• Google's open-source Gemini CLI (86K+ GitHub stars) brings Gemini's capabilities directly to terminals with recent updates adding authentication improvements and specialized agent delegation functionality.

BUSINESS

Funding & Investment

• Sequoia Capital Invests in fal: Sequoia announced a partnership with fal, a generative media company, as detailed in their latest investment announcement. (2025-12-09)

• ElevenLabs Valued at $6.6B: The AI voice technology company has doubled its valuation in just nine months, with a recent $100 million tender offer led by Sequoia and ICONIQ, with participation from a16z. The CEO indicates the company is expanding beyond voice technology into new areas. (2025-12-10)

M&A and Leadership Changes

• Kabir Narang Exits B Capital: The founding partner of B Capital is leaving to launch a new investment platform in 2026 focused on "compounding at the intersection of technology, AI, and global capital flows." (2025-12-09)

• Google Promotes AI Infrastructure Lead: Google has promoted Amin Vahdat to chief technologist for AI infrastructure, a newly created position reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai, signaling the company's intensified focus on AI infrastructure development. (2025-12-10)

Company Updates

• Nvidia Testing Chip-Tracking Software: Amid rumors of chip smuggling, Nvidia is reportedly developing software that could track the approximate location of some of its AI chips, potentially addressing supply chain security concerns. (2025-12-10)

• Google Testing AI Article Overviews: Google is experimenting with AI-powered article summaries on select publications' Google News pages, providing users with more context before clicking through to read articles. (2025-12-10)

• Spotify Expands AI Features: Spotify is testing more personalized "Prompted Playlists" powered by AI that can incorporate world knowledge and users' complete listening history, with options for daily or weekly refreshes. (2025-12-10)

• Cashew Research Targets Market Research Industry: The startup is using AI to automate the $90B market research process while still collecting real-world data from humans. (2025-12-09)

Regulatory Developments

• State AGs Warn AI Companies: State attorneys general have issued warnings to Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other AI companies to address "delusional" outputs from their models, demanding new safeguards to protect users from potential psychological harm. (2025-12-10)

PRODUCTS

Unsloth Releases New Triton Kernels for LLM Training

Unsloth | Open Source | 2025-12-10

Unsloth has released new Triton kernels and smart auto packing support that significantly improves LLM training efficiency. According to their announcement on Reddit, the new technology enables: - 3x-5x faster training speeds - 30-90% reduction in VRAM requirements - No accuracy degradation

The improvements allow models like Qwen3-4B to be trained on as little as 3.9GB of VRAM while maintaining performance. The update includes custom RoPE and MLP Triton kernels that optimize memory usage during training, making LLM fine-tuning more accessible to those with limited computational resources.

Qwen Image to LoRA Tool Released

Qwen Image to LoRA | Open Source | 2025-12-10

A new tool called "Qwen Image to LoRA" has been released that enables users to generate custom LoRA models in as little as one minute. The tool, demonstrated on the r/StableDiffusion subreddit, allows users to quickly create customized image generation models from reference images. This represents a significant speed improvement over traditional LoRA training workflows, which typically take much longer to generate similar results.

Z-Image Demonstrates Advanced Image Generation Capabilities

Z-Image | 2025-12-10

Z-Image, an AI image generation system, is showing impressive results with likeness capture using LoRAs (Low-Rank Adaptations). A demonstration shared on Reddit showcased the tool's ability to generate high-quality images with simple workflows. Users praised its out-of-the-box capabilities and the quality of character likeness it can produce, suggesting it's becoming a strong competitor in the text-to-image generation space.

TECHNOLOGY

Open Source Projects

langgenius/dify - Production-Ready LLM Workflow Platform

A TypeScript-based platform for developing and deploying agentic workflows with 121K+ stars. Dify recently added file upload capabilities for workflows, enabling podcast-like features similar to Google NotebookLM. Recent improvements include fixing custom model credential security issues.

google-gemini/gemini-cli - Terminal-Based Gemini Agent

This open-source CLI brings Gemini's capabilities directly to your terminal with 86K+ GitHub stars. Recent updates include authentication improvements, support for delegating tasks to specialized agents, and integration with git through transcript path functionality in hooks.

microsoft/ML-For-Beginners - Comprehensive ML Education

A structured 12-week curriculum featuring 26 lessons and 52 quizzes on classic machine learning concepts. With 81K+ stars and 19K+ forks, this resource remains popular for newcomers to ML. Recently updated with fresh translations via Co-op Translator.

Models & Datasets

Text-to-Speech Advancements

microsoft/VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B - A lightweight, real-time text-to-speech model (0.5B parameters) optimized for streaming inputs and long-form speech generation. Notable for its efficiency and MIT license, it's already accumulated 67K+ downloads.

webml-community/Supertonic-TTS-WebGPU - A WebGPU-based text-to-speech space allowing in-browser TTS inference without server-side processing.

Multimodal Models

Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo - A high-performance text-to-image diffusion model with 232K+ downloads and 2.4K+ likes. The model has a dedicated interactive space for trying out its capabilities.

zai-org/GLM-4.6V and zai-org/GLM-4.6V-Flash - Multimodal models supporting any-to-any conversational interactions with both image and text. The Flash variant offers faster inference while maintaining quality.

Foundation Models

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.2 - A powerful text generation model with 40K+ downloads, supporting FP8 optimization and available through endpoints. Licensed under MIT, making it suitable for commercial applications.

mistralai/Ministral_3B_WebGPU - A WebGPU implementation of Mistral's 3B parameter model for client-side inference directly in the browser.

Valuable Datasets

Anthropic/AnthropicInterviewer - A dataset with 6K+ downloads containing interview-style interactions, useful for training conversational agents on structured dialogue.

TuringEnterprises/Turing-Open-Reasoning - A specialized reasoning dataset covering chemistry, physics, math, biology, and code challenges for training and evaluating language models.

nvidia/PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles - An extensive dataset for autonomous vehicle development with 177K+ downloads, highlighting NVIDIA's continued focus on transportation AI.

nvidia/ToolScale - A dataset for training and evaluating tool use capabilities in language models, referenced in a recent arXiv paper (2511.21689).

Developer Tools & Spaces

HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook - A popular resource (2.5K+ likes) for training smaller language models efficiently, presented as an interactive research article with visualizations.

burtenshaw/karpathy-llm-council - A Gradio space implementing the "LLM Council" concept discussed by Andrej Karpathy, demonstrating how to leverage multiple models for more robust decision-making.

MCP-1st-Birthday/anim-lab-ai - An educational space combining Claude's capabilities with visualization tools for explaining mathematical concepts and algorithms.

prithivMLmods/Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-LoRAs-Fast - A specialized implementation for fast image editing using LoRA-enhanced Qwen models.

RESEARCH

Paper of the Day

SCOPE: Language Models as One-Time Teacher for Hierarchical Planning in Text Environments (2025-12-10)
Haoye Lu, Pavan Seshadri, Kaheer Suleman

SCOPE introduces a groundbreaking approach that leverages large language models as one-time teachers for hierarchical planning in complex text environments, addressing a significant efficiency gap in existing methods. Unlike previous approaches that rely on costly LLM queries during both training and inference, SCOPE distills LLM knowledge into a student policy that can operate independently, achieving comparable performance to LLM-dependent methods while eliminating the need for ongoing LLM interaction. This work represents a major advancement in making LLM-guided planning more practical and scalable for real-world applications.

Notable Research

An End-to-end Planning Framework with Agentic LLMs and PDDL (2025-12-10)
Emanuele La Malfa, Ping Zhu, Samuele Marro, Sara Bernardini, Michael Wooldridge
The authors present a novel end-to-end framework that combines agentic LLMs with formal planning methods (PDDL), enabling automated conversion of natural language specifications into verifiable planning models that address time constraints, optimality requirements, and ambiguities.

Understanding Chain-of-Thought Effectiveness in Code Generation (2025-12-10)
Naizhu Jin, Zhong Li, Guang Yang, Tian Zhang, Qingkai Zeng
This research provides the first comprehensive empirical and information-theoretic analysis of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in code generation, revealing how CoT significantly improves performance by reducing entropy in the model's output distribution and enhancing reasoning.

IF-Bench: Benchmarking and Enhancing MLLMs for Infrared Images (2025-12-10)
Tao Zhang, Yuyang Hong, Yang Xia, Kun Ding, Zeyu Zhang, Ying Wang, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
The researchers introduce the first high-quality benchmark for evaluating multimodal LLMs on infrared image understanding, featuring 499 images from 23 infrared datasets and 680 QA pairs covering 10 essential dimensions of visual intelligence.

KV-CAR: KV Cache Compression using Autoencoders and KV Reuse (2025-12-07)
Sourjya Roy, Shrihari Sridharan, Surya Selvam, Anand Raghunathan
This paper presents a novel approach to significantly reduce memory consumption during LLM inference by combining autoencoder-based compression of key-value caches with a technique for reusing cached key-value pairs, achieving substantial memory savings with minimal accuracy loss.

LOOKING AHEAD

As 2026 approaches, we're witnessing the emergence of truly multimodal AI systems that seamlessly integrate text, vision, audio, and biological data. The Q1 2026 release of several anticipated neuromorphic computing platforms promises to reduce energy consumption by up to 90% compared to current models, potentially addressing one of AI's biggest sustainability challenges. Meanwhile, regulatory frameworks are finally catching up, with the EU's AI Act Phase II implementation and similar US federal guidelines expected by mid-2026. Watch for increased investment in AI safety research as companies prepare for these new compliance requirements while simultaneously pushing technical boundaries in reasoning capabilities and real-world embodied AI applications.