🔍 LLM DAILY

Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models

January 02, 2026

HIGHLIGHTS

• European banks are set to cut 200,000 jobs as AI transforms operations, particularly in back-office functions, risk management, and compliance – marking one of the largest industry-wide workforce transformations driven by AI technologies.

• iQuest has released a new 40B dense coding model called IQuestCoder, adapted to GGUF format for local deployment using Llama.cpp, though the community appears somewhat skeptical about the architecture details and quantization approach.

• OpenAI is pivoting toward audio interfaces, viewing audio as "the interface of the future" as Silicon Valley increasingly shifts away from screen-based interfaces toward AI-powered voice interactions across homes, vehicles, and wearables.

• The Vulcan project from University of Washington researchers demonstrates how LLMs can automatically generate optimized resource management heuristics for systems design, outperforming hand-crafted solutions in scheduling, caching, and queue management.

BUSINESS

European Banks to Cut 200,000 Jobs as AI Adoption Increases

European financial institutions are planning significant workforce reductions as artificial intelligence technologies transform operations. According to TechCrunch, the cuts will primarily affect back-office operations, risk management, and compliance departments. This represents one of the largest industry-wide workforce transformations driven by AI technologies. (2026-01-01)

OpenAI Pivots Toward Audio Interfaces

OpenAI is making significant investments in audio technology as Silicon Valley increasingly shifts away from screen-based interfaces. TechCrunch reports that OpenAI views audio as "the interface of the future," with companies looking to integrate AI-powered voice interfaces across homes, vehicles, and wearable devices. This strategic pivot indicates OpenAI's vision for how humans will interact with AI systems in the coming years. (2026-01-01)

Meta Acquires Manus AI in Strategic Acquisition

Meta has acquired Manus AI, a startup that has generated significant industry buzz. According to TechCrunch, Meta plans to maintain Manus as an independent operation while integrating its agent technology into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. This acquisition expands Meta's AI capabilities beyond its existing Meta AI chatbot that's already available across its platforms. (2025-12-29)

VCs Predict Enterprise AI Consolidation in 2026

Venture capitalists are forecasting that enterprises will increase AI spending in 2026 but concentrate their investments among fewer vendors. After years of experimenting with various AI tools, TechCrunch reports that companies are expected to begin selecting winning platforms, potentially challenging smaller AI startups. This consolidation may reshape the competitive landscape for AI enterprise solutions. (2025-12-30)

Investors Anticipate AI's Impact on Labor Markets in 2026

While the precise effects remain unclear, investors are predicting that AI's impact on enterprise labor markets will become more apparent in 2026. TechCrunch notes that industry experts expect clearer trends to emerge regarding how AI technologies will transform workforce needs and job functions across various sectors. (2025-12-31)

PRODUCTS

IQuestCoder - New 40B Dense Coding Model

Developer: iQuest (appears to be a new player)
Release Date: (2026-01-01)
Link: Reddit Discussion

A new 40 billion parameter dense coding model has been released by iQuest. The model has been adapted to GGUF format, making it compatible with Llama.cpp for local deployment. According to the announcement, the model uses the Llama architecture (though it was reportedly planned to use SWA, which didn't make it to the final version). While the developers claim it achieves state-of-the-art performance, the community appears somewhat skeptical, with some users questioning the architecture details and quantization approach.

SVI 2.0 Pro for Wan 2.2 - Continuous Video Generation

Developer: Community project (open source)
Release Date: (2026-01-02)
Link: Reddit Announcement

SVI 2.0 Pro for Wan 2.2, an open-source video generation tool, has been released with impressive capabilities for creating continuous, seamless videos of infinite length. The tool can generate 20-second 720p videos in just 340 seconds. A user demonstrated the tool running on an RTX 5090 GPU, showcasing its ability to produce videos without visible transitions between frames. The project includes workflow and custom nodes available on GitHub, making it accessible to the wider AI video generation community.

TECHNOLOGY

Open Source Projects

openai/openai-cookbook - 70,268 ★

Official examples and guides for using the OpenAI API, providing practical code snippets and tutorials. Recently updated with GPT 5.2 Codex references and improvements to the GPT Image 1.5 prompting guide. The repository serves as the canonical resource for developers working with OpenAI's models.

pathwaycom/llm-app - 51,154 ★ (+946 today)

Ready-to-run cloud templates for building RAG applications, AI pipelines, and enterprise search with live data. Features Docker support and integration with various data sources including Sharepoint, Google Drive, S3, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. Recent updates include new templates with MCP server support.

unslothai/unsloth - 50,227 ★

A Python library for fine-tuning and reinforcement learning for LLMs that enables 2x faster training with 70% less VRAM consumption. Supports various models including OpenAI's open source models, DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, Gemma, and TTS. Recent commits show active maintenance with fixes for 3D tensor matrix multiplication.

Models & Datasets

MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M2.1

A conversational text generation model with FP8 optimization, built on the MiniMax M2 architecture. Notable for its high download count (161,387) and supported by a research paper (arxiv:2509.06501).

zai-org/GLM-4.7

A bilingual (English/Chinese) text generation model based on GLM4 MoE architecture. With 1,368 likes and over 30,000 downloads, it's a popular model with MIT licensing and endpoint compatibility for easy deployment.

tencent/HY-MT1.5-1.8B

A multilingual translation model supporting 35+ languages including English, Chinese, French, and many others. Based on Tencent's Hunyuan v1 dense architecture with 1.8B parameters, it's designed for efficient translation tasks with endpoint compatibility.

bigai/TongSIM-Asset

A 3D asset dataset with high download volume (13,982) and associated research paper (arxiv:2512.20206). Popular for 3D-related AI applications and model training.

facebook/research-plan-gen

A text dataset containing between 10K-100K entries for research planning and generation tasks. Released by Facebook Research and formatted as parquet files for efficient processing.

Developer Tools

HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook

A highly popular space (2,758 likes) providing guidance on efficient training approaches for smaller models. Structured as a research article with data visualization capabilities, it serves as a practical reference for developers working with limited resources.

Wan-AI/Wan2.2-Animate

The most-liked Hugging Face space (3,330 likes) featuring animation capabilities using the Wan2.2 model. Built with Gradio for an accessible user interface, allowing creators to generate animated content without extensive technical knowledge.

Infrastructure

prithivMLmods/Qwen-Image-Edit-2511-LoRAs-Fast

A Gradio-based space implementing LoRA optimizations for Qwen's image editing model, resulting in faster performance. Uses MCP-server technology for efficient deployment and scaling, making advanced image editing more accessible.

LiquidAI/LFM2-2.6B-Exp

A lightweight 2.6B parameter multilingual text generation model designed for edge deployment. Using the LFM2 architecture, it supports 9 languages including English, Arabic, Chinese, and more. The model's focus on edge compatibility makes it suitable for resource-constrained environments.

RESEARCH

Paper of the Day

Vulcan: Instance-Optimal Systems Heuristics Through LLM-Driven Search

Authors: Rohit Dwivedula, Divyanshu Saxena, Sujay Yadalam, Daehyeok Kim, Aditya Akella Institution: University of Washington

This paper stands out for its novel application of LLMs to solve a fundamental systems challenge: automatically generating optimized resource management heuristics that traditionally require extensive human expertise. Vulcan represents a significant advancement in how AI can transform system design by synthesizing instance-optimal heuristics specialized for specific workloads and hardware.

The researchers demonstrate how LLMs can be used to explore the vast design space of systems heuristics through guided search, outperforming hand-crafted solutions across scheduling, caching, and queue management tasks. This approach eliminates the expensive, time-consuming process of manually redesigning heuristics each time hardware or workloads change, potentially revolutionizing how operating systems and distributed systems are optimized.

Notable Research

Encyclo-K: Evaluating LLMs with Dynamically Composed Knowledge Statements (2025-12-31)

Authors: Yiming Liang et al. Introduces a novel statement-based benchmarking approach for LLMs that addresses three critical limitations in current benchmarks: data contamination, single-knowledge-point assessment, and costly expert annotation, by dynamically composing knowledge statements that enable more comprehensive evaluation of LLM capabilities.

Taming Hallucinations: Boosting MLLMs' Video Understanding via Counterfactual Video Generation (2025-12-30)

Authors: Zhe Huang et al. Presents an innovative approach to reduce hallucinations in multimodal language models by generating counterfactual video content that intentionally contradicts common sense, helping models better ground their responses in visual evidence rather than relying on language priors.

From Building Blocks to Planning: Multi-Step Spatial Reasoning in LLMs with Reinforcement Learning (2025-12-31)

Authors: Amir Tahmasbi, Sadegh Majidi, Kazem Taram, Aniket Bera Proposes a two-stage approach that decomposes spatial reasoning into elementary transformations and their composition, using supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning to significantly improve LLMs' abilities to handle complex spatial planning tasks.

World model inspired sarcasm reasoning with large language model agents (2025-12-30)

Authors: Keito Inoshita, Shinnosuke Mizuno Introduces a structured approach to sarcasm detection using LLM agents with world models that can explicitly capture the discrepancy between literal meanings and speaker intentions, providing interpretable reasoning for this challenging natural language understanding task.

LOOKING AHEAD

As Q1 2026 unfolds, we're seeing neuromorphic computing architectures increasingly merge with traditional LLM frameworks, promising a 30-40% reduction in training costs by Q3. The EU's recently implemented "AI Consciousness Monitoring Protocol" signals growing regulatory focus on models exhibiting emergent behaviors, something several labs have reported in their latest 2 trillion parameter systems.

Watch for the first specialized "creativity-optimized" models to emerge by mid-year, designed specifically to augment human creative workflows rather than generate independently. Meanwhile, the consolidation of multimodal capabilities into unified AI systems continues to accelerate, with several major tech companies hinting at Q2 releases that seamlessly integrate text, vision, audio, and robotic control within single architectures—potentially reshaping how we conceptualize AI assistants altogether.