🔍 LLM DAILY

Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models

December 19, 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

• OpenAI has launched an app store for ChatGPT, creating a new monetization ecosystem for developers while ChatGPT's mobile app has reached $3 billion in consumer spending—faster than TikTok and major streaming platforms.

• Meta AI has expanded its segmentation technology with three new models: SAM 3 (improved core capabilities), SAM 3D (extending to 3D environments), and SAM Audio (bringing segmentation techniques to audio processing).

• Researchers have established new scaling laws for CPU-only LLM inference, revealing crucial energy efficiency patterns and demonstrating that smaller models can be more energy-efficient for certain tasks on CPUs.

• The OpenBB financial data platform has gained significant traction with over 55,000 GitHub stars, providing integrated tools for analysts, quants, and AI agents to access comprehensive financial data.

BUSINESS

OpenAI Launches App Store for ChatGPT

[2025-12-18] OpenAI has launched an app store for ChatGPT, creating new monetization opportunities for developers. According to TechCrunch, this move aims to populate its flagship chatbot with a host of new user experiences, signaling OpenAI's push to build an ecosystem around its AI platform. Source

ChatGPT Mobile App Reaches $3B in Consumer Spending

[2025-12-18] ChatGPT's mobile app has hit a significant milestone of $3 billion in consumer spending in just 31 months, reaching this mark faster than TikTok and major streaming platforms. This achievement demonstrates the remarkable commercial success of AI applications in the consumer market. Source

Former British Chancellor Joins OpenAI as Managing Director

[2025-12-18] George Osborne, the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer, has joined OpenAI as managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries. In a notable move reflecting the growing intersection of tech and politics, Osborne will also run Coinbase's internal advisory council. Source

Pickle Robot Adds Tesla Veteran as First CFO

[2025-12-18] Robotics startup Pickle Robot has appointed Jeff Evanson, a Tesla veteran, as its first Chief Financial Officer. The company has reportedly expanded its partnership with UPS, suggesting potential growth in the logistics automation sector. Source

Amazon Forms New AI Organization Under AWS Veteran

[2025-12-17] Amazon has appointed Peter DeSantis, a 27-year company veteran who spent eight years as an SVP for AWS, to lead its new AI organization. This strategic move reinforces Amazon's commitment to strengthening its position in the competitive AI landscape. Source

Google Launches Gemini 3 Flash as Default Model

[2025-12-17] Google has released Gemini 3 Flash, making it the default model in the Gemini app and the AI model powering Google Search. This update represents Google's continued effort to enhance its AI offerings and integrate them more deeply into its core products. Source

Peripheral Labs Raises $3.6M for Sports Viewing Technology

[2025-12-18] Peripheral Labs, a startup leveraging self-driving car sensor technology to enhance sports viewing experiences, has secured a $3.6 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures. The company's technology aims to bring fans closer to the action in sporting events. Source

Leona Health Secures $14M to Address Healthcare Communication in Latin America

[2025-12-16] Leona Health has raised a $14 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to develop an AI co-pilot that helps doctors manage patient messages on WhatsApp in Latin America. This funding highlights growing investor interest in AI applications for healthcare communication challenges in emerging markets. Source

PRODUCTS

Meta Announces SAM 3, SAM 3D, and SAM Audio for Advanced Segmentation

Meta AI | Established Player | (2025-12-17)

Meta AI has released a significant update to its Segment Anything Model (SAM) family with three new models focused on advanced segmentation capabilities. The research team conducted an AMA on Reddit, highlighting the key features of these new models:

• SAM 3: The latest iteration of Meta's segmentation model with improved performance and capabilities
• SAM 3D: Extends segmentation capabilities to 3D spaces and environments
• SAM Audio: A novel approach that brings segmentation techniques to audio processing

These open-source models continue Meta's commitment to advancing segmentation technology across different modalities.

Jax-JS: JAX Reimplemented in JavaScript with WebGPU Support

jax-js.com | Developer Project | (2025-12-18)

A developer has created Jax-JS, a full reimplementation of Google's JAX machine learning library in pure JavaScript. Unlike existing solutions that focus on runtime execution, Jax-JS provides a complete research-oriented library for the browser with:

• Full support for JIT compilation to WebGPU
• Native autograd capabilities
• Ability to define and train neural networks directly in the browser
• Performance optimization through compilation

This project bridges the gap between browser-based ML runtimes and full-featured research libraries like PyTorch and JAX.

Alibaba Introduces Qwen-Image-Layered for Editable Image Generation

Alibaba/QwenLM | Established Player | (2025-12-18)

Alibaba has published research on "Qwen-Image-Layered," a novel diffusion model that decomposes a single RGB image into multiple semantically disentangled RGBA layers. The approach offers:

• Inherent editability where each RGBA layer can be independently manipulated
• Support for variable-length decomposition based on image complexity
• Preservation of content relationships during editing

While the repository has been announced, it doesn't appear to be active yet. The technology represents a significant step forward in controllable image generation and editing.

TECHNOLOGY

Open Source Projects

• OpenBB-finance/OpenBB - A comprehensive financial data platform designed for analysts, quants, and AI agents. With 55,653 stars and active development (46 stars added today), this Python-based platform brings together financial data tools in an integrated environment.

• facebookresearch/segment-anything - Meta's repository for the Segment Anything Model (SAM), providing code for running inference, trained model checkpoints, and example notebooks. With 52,952 stars and consistent growth, it remains one of the most influential computer vision segmentation models.

• CompVis/stable-diffusion - The original latent text-to-image diffusion model repository with 72,026 stars. While development has slowed (last significant commit in 2022), it's the foundation that launched the modern text-to-image generation ecosystem.

Models & Datasets

• Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo - A high-performance text-to-image diffusion model with 3,003 likes and 322,827 downloads. The model comes with impressive generation capabilities and is backed by multiple research papers.

• nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-BF16 - NVIDIA's 30B parameter language model with 361 likes and 51,262 downloads. This multilingual model (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian) is trained on a diverse set of datasets and optimized for conversational applications.

• OpenMed/Medical-Reasoning-SFT-GPT-OSS-120B - A specialized medical reasoning dataset with 145 likes and 1,468 downloads. Released under Apache-2.0 license, it contains between 100K and 1M samples for training medical AI assistants.

• Anthropic/AnthropicInterviewer - Anthropic's interview dataset with 320 likes and 10,855 downloads. This MIT-licensed dataset contains 1K-10K conversational samples designed for training and evaluating AI assistants.

• TuringEnterprises/Turing-Open-Reasoning - A specialized reasoning dataset covering chemistry, physics, math, biology, and code. With 158 likes and 18,964 downloads, it provides challenging question-answer pairs to test reasoning capabilities.

Developer Tools & Spaces

• ResembleAI/chatterbox-turbo-demo - A demo space for the ResembleAI/chatterbox-turbo text-to-speech model. With 275 likes, it showcases voice cloning and real-time speech generation capabilities.

• AiSudo/Qwen-Image-to-LoRA - A Gradio interface with 220 likes that allows users to generate LoRA adaptations from images using the Qwen model, enabling quick customization of image generation.

• Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo - The demo space for Z-Image-Turbo with an impressive 1,431 likes, providing a user-friendly interface to interact with this high-performance text-to-image model.

• HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook - A research-oriented Docker space with 2,612 likes that provides a comprehensive guide and visualization tools for training small language models efficiently.

RESEARCH

Paper of the Day

Scaling Laws for Energy Efficiency of Local LLMs (2025-12-18) Ander Alvarez, Alessandro Genuardi, Nilotpal Sinha, Antonio Tiene, Samuel Mugel, Román Orús

This groundbreaking study addresses a critical gap in LLM deployment research by establishing scaling laws specifically for CPU-only inference—crucial for the vast majority of consumer and industrial hardware that lacks specialized AI accelerators. The researchers comprehensively analyzed energy efficiency across model sizes and architectures, providing essential benchmarks and mathematical relationships that will guide future optimization of LLMs for resource-constrained environments.

The paper introduces novel metrics for measuring energy consumption during inference, demonstrating how energy scales with model parameters, and revealing the surprising finding that smaller models can be more energy-efficient for certain tasks when running on CPUs. These insights are particularly valuable as the industry pushes toward local, on-device AI deployment where energy constraints are paramount.

Notable Research

From Facts to Conclusions: Integrating Deductive Reasoning in Retrieval-Augmented LLMs (2025-12-18) Shubham Mishra, Samyek Jain, Gorang Mehrishi, et al. This paper introduces a reasoning-trace-augmented RAG framework that significantly improves LLMs' ability to handle conflicting or unreliable information through a three-stage process of document adjudication, conflict analysis, and grounded synthesis with citation linking.

Sketch-in-Latents: Eliciting Unified Reasoning in MLLMs (2025-12-18) Jintao Tong, Jiaqi Gu, Yujing Lou, et al. The researchers present a novel approach to visual imagination in multimodal LLMs by constructing a unified visual-text thinking process in latent space, enabling more flexible reasoning without predefined external toolkits.

A Systematic Study of Code Obfuscation Against LLM-based Vulnerability Detection (2025-12-18) Xiao Li, Yue Li, Hao Wu, et al. This comprehensive evaluation examines how various code obfuscation techniques can bypass LLM-based vulnerability detection systems, revealing critical security implications for code analysis tools and providing insights for improving their robustness.

In-Context Probing for Membership Inference in Fine-Tuned Language Models (2025-12-18) Zhexi Lu, Hongliang Chi, Nathalie Baracaldo, et al. The paper introduces a novel in-context learning approach that effectively determines whether specific data was used to fine-tune an LLM, raising important privacy concerns about model training data vulnerability.

LOOKING AHEAD

As 2025 draws to a close, we're witnessing the acceleration of multimodal reasoning capabilities in LLMs, with models now demonstrating unprecedented spatial and temporal understanding across diverse data types. The Q1 2026 release calendar suggests we'll see the first commercial deployment of fully recursive self-improvement systems, where models can meaningfully enhance their own architectures—though under careful human oversight. Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape is poised for significant change, with the EU's AI Harmonization Act set for a final vote in February and similar frameworks gaining traction globally.

Watch for breakthroughs in computational efficiency as well—the recent advances in quantum-inspired tensor processing are projected to reduce training costs by 60-70% in the coming year, potentially democratizing access to state-of-the-art AI development across a much broader research community.