🔍 LLM DAILY

Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models

December 16, 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

• Chai Discovery has secured a $130M Series B at a $1.3B valuation to advance their foundation models for drug discovery, specifically focusing on predicting molecule interactions that could be reprogrammed for medical treatments.

• AI2 (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) is hosting an AMA with researchers from their Olmo and Molmo teams, offering the AI community direct engagement with developers of these fully open language and multimodal models.

• Researchers from Bar-Ilan University and Allen Institute for AI have introduced the State over Tokens (SoT) framework, revealing that chain-of-thought reasoning tokens function more as an externalized computational workspace rather than representing the model's actual thought process.

• The AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui project continues to dominate as the most popular interface for Stable Diffusion with nearly 160,000 GitHub stars, receiving active updates as recently as this week.

BUSINESS

Funding & Investment

• Chai Discovery Raises $130M Series B at $1.3B Valuation (2025-12-15): The OpenAI-backed biotech firm secured significant funding to advance its work on foundation models for drug discovery. The company specifically focuses on predicting interactions between molecules that could be reprogrammed for medical treatments. TechCrunch

• Sequoia Capital Partners with Serval (2025-12-11): Sequoia announced its investment in Serval, a startup focused on empowering IT departments for AI enterprise automation. Sequoia Capital

• Sequoia Capital Backs fal (2025-12-09): Sequoia has partnered with fal, described as "The Generative Media Company," though specific investment details weren't disclosed. Sequoia Capital

M&A and Partnerships

• Nvidia Acquires SchedMD (2025-12-15): Nvidia has acquired SchedMD, the lead developer of Slurm, as part of its strategy to expand its open source offerings. This acquisition strengthens Nvidia's position in the AI infrastructure space. TechCrunch

• Disney-OpenAI Partnership Details Revealed (2025-12-15): Disney's exclusive deal with OpenAI will last just one year, after which Disney will be free to pursue similar arrangements with other AI companies. This suggests a cautious approach to AI exclusivity in the entertainment industry. TechCrunch

Company Updates

• Nvidia Launches Open Source AI Models (2025-12-15): Alongside its SchedMD acquisition, Nvidia announced the release of the Nemotron 3 family of open source AI models, further expanding its portfolio of AI offerings. TechCrunch

• Creative Commons Tentatively Supports AI 'Pay-to-Crawl' Systems (2025-12-15): The organization has expressed preliminary support for AI marketplace concepts that would compensate content creators when their work is used for AI training. They've outlined several guiding principles for such systems. TechCrunch

Market Analysis

• VCs Question Longevity of Consumer AI Startups (2025-12-16): Venture capitalists are discussing why consumer-focused AI startups still struggle to demonstrate lasting power in the market. Some suggest a new personal device may be necessary to drive the next consumer tech revolution. TechCrunch

PRODUCTS

AI2 to Host AMA with Researchers from Olmo and Molmo Teams

AI2 (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence) | (2025-12-16)

The nonprofit AI lab behind the fully open Olmo and Molmo models will be hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Tuesday, December 16 from 1-2pm PST. This presents an opportunity for the AI community to engage directly with researchers and engineers working on these open-source language and multimodal models. Users can submit questions in advance about model training, optimization techniques (like the recent Muon optimizer), and other aspects of open AI development.

Nano Banana Pro Model Released for Stable Diffusion

Nano Banana Pro | (2025-12-15)

A new image generation model called Nano Banana Pro has been released for the Stable Diffusion community. Based on user demonstrations, the model appears to produce highly realistic images with exceptional detail and natural-looking human faces. The model is being used in combination with WAN2.2 and the WAN FFLF extension (available on Civitai) to create smooth image transitions and animations. Community reception has been notably positive, with users highlighting the model's ability to render convincing human expressions.

TECHNOLOGY

Open Source Projects

AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui

The most popular web UI for Stable Diffusion with 158,982 GitHub stars. This comprehensive interface offers a complete suite of image generation tools including outpainting, inpainting, color sketch functionality, and advanced features like prompt matrix and upscaling. Recent updates were pushed just this week, demonstrating active maintenance of this essential tool for the diffusion community.

openai/openai-cookbook

Official examples and guides for using the OpenAI API with 69,740 stars (+34 today). The repository provides practical code snippets and comprehensive guides for accomplishing common tasks with OpenAI models. Recent commits show continuous updates, including new guidance for GPT-5.2 prompting and web research capabilities.

Models & Datasets

Text-to-Image Models

Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo

A high-performance text-to-image model with 2,761 likes and 286,283 downloads. Based on research from multiple recent papers, this model has gained significant traction for its quality and speed, as evidenced by its popular demo space with 1,390 likes.

Multimodal Models

zai-org/GLM-4.6V-Flash

A streamlined multimodal model supporting any-to-any processing (448 likes, 84,213 downloads). This model handles image-text-to-text tasks efficiently while maintaining strong conversational capabilities in both Chinese and English, based on research published in arxiv:2507.01006.

zai-org/GLM-4.6V

The more powerful MoE-based variant of GLM-4.6V with 313 likes. This model offers enhanced multimodal capabilities while maintaining the same input/output flexibility as its Flash counterpart.

Audio Generation

microsoft/VibeVoice-Realtime-0.5B

A real-time text-to-speech model with 860 likes and 142,846 downloads. Built on Qwen/Qwen2.5-0.5B, this model specializes in streaming text input and long-form speech generation, making it ideal for applications requiring responsive audio output. The model is based on research from arxiv:2508.19205 and arxiv:2412.08635.

Developer-Focused LLMs

mistralai/Devstral-Small-2-24B-Instruct-2512

A 24B parameter instruction-tuned model from Mistral AI with 358 likes and 21,397 downloads. Based on Mistral-Small-3.1-24B, this model offers optimized FP8 quantization and is specifically designed for developer-focused applications.

Datasets

Anthropic/AnthropicInterviewer

A collection of interview-style interactions for training assistant models (286 likes, 9,070 downloads). The dataset contains between 1K-10K examples in CSV format and was last updated on December 8th, providing high-quality conversation data for fine-tuning.

OpenMed/Medical-Reasoning-SFT-GPT-OSS-120B

A specialized medical reasoning dataset with 102 likes designed for supervised fine-tuning of large language models. With between 100K-1M entries in Parquet format, this dataset addresses the specialized needs of healthcare AI applications and was last updated on December 12th.

TuringEnterprises/Turing-Open-Reasoning

A question-answering dataset focused on reasoning across multiple disciplines (133 likes, 12,064 downloads). Covering chemistry, physics, math, biology, and code, this dataset provides challenging reasoning problems for evaluating and improving LLM capabilities.

Interactive Demos & Tools

Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo Space

The official demo for Z-Image-Turbo with 1,390 likes. This Gradio-based interface showcases the model's text-to-image generation capabilities in an accessible format.

HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook

A comprehensive resource for training smaller language models with 2,598 likes. This Docker-based space provides visualizations, research papers, and practical guidance for efficient model training, making advanced techniques more accessible to developers with limited computing resources.

AiSudo/Qwen-Image-to-LoRA

A tool for generating LoRA adaptations from images with 155 likes. This Gradio-based interface simplifies the process of creating custom image generation models from reference images, democratizing personalized AI art creation.

prithivMLmods/Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-LoRAs-Fast

A fast image editing application built with Qwen and LoRAs (437 likes). This space demonstrates efficient image manipulation capabilities using optimized model adaptations.

RESEARCH

Paper of the Day

State over Tokens: Characterizing the Role of Reasoning Tokens (2025-12-14)
Mosh Levy, Zohar Elyoseph, Shauli Ravfogel, Yoav Goldberg
Bar-Ilan University & Allen Institute for AI

This paper is significant because it reframes our understanding of how chain-of-thought reasoning actually works in LLMs, challenging the prevalent view that reasoning tokens represent the model's actual thought process. The authors introduce the State over Tokens (SoT) framework, showing that reasoning tokens function more as an externalized computational workspace rather than a narrative explanation of the model's reasoning.

The research demonstrates that LLMs don't "read" their own reasoning tokens to reach conclusions; instead, these tokens help modify the model's hidden state to better solve complex tasks. This insight has profound implications for how we interpret and design prompt engineering strategies, suggesting that reasoning tokens serve as a computational medium rather than a linguistic narrative.

Notable Research

Reasoning Within the Mind: Dynamic Multimodal Interleaving in Latent Space (2025-12-14)
Chengzhi Liu, Yuzhe Yang, Yue Fan, Qingyue Wei, Sheng Liu, Xin Eric Wang
The paper presents a novel approach that extends multimodal reasoning by performing image generation and reasoning operations directly in the latent space, enabling more efficient and stable multimodal reasoning without relying on explicit step-by-step token generation.

AgentSHAP: Interpreting LLM Agent Tool Importance with Monte Carlo Shapley Value Estimation (2025-12-14)
Miriam Horovicz
This research introduces the first framework for explaining tool importance in LLM agents, using Monte Carlo Shapley values to quantify each tool's contribution to agent responses, addressing a critical gap in explainable AI for tool-using agents.

Vision-Enhanced Large Language Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis (2025-12-14)
Karthikeya KV
The author introduces a transformative framework integrating vision-enhanced LLMs with transformer architectures, incorporating a rectified flow mechanism and bidirectional tokenization strategy to significantly improve high-resolution image generation and multimodal data interpretation.

NagaNLP: Bootstrapping NLP for Low-Resource Nagamese Creole with Human-in-the-Loop Synthetic Data (2025-12-14)
Agniva Maiti, Manya Pandey, Murari Mandal
This work presents a novel methodology for developing NLP resources for under-resourced languages by using LLMs (specifically Gemini) with expert human validation to create synthetic training data for Nagamese Creole, demonstrating a scalable approach to addressing linguistic digital divides.

LOOKING AHEAD

As we approach 2026, multimodal AI systems are evolving beyond simple text-to-image capabilities into fully integrated sensory frameworks. The Q1 2026 release of several open-source models capable of processing and generating across six modalities simultaneously will likely accelerate development of truly embodied AI. Meanwhile, regulatory frameworks are finally catching up—the EU's AI Harmony Act and similar legislation pending in the US signal a more balanced approach to innovation and safety.

Watch for the emergence of "collective intelligence systems" in early 2026, where specialized AI agents collaborate in real-time to solve complex problems with minimal human oversight. These systems, combined with advancements in low-power neural processing, may represent the next significant leap beyond today's large foundation models.