LLM Daily: July 09, 2025
🔍 LLM DAILY
Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models
July 09, 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
• LangChain and Mistral AI are securing major funding rounds, with LangChain approaching a $1 billion valuation led by IVP, while Mistral is in talks to raise up to $1 billion, strengthening its position as one of Europe's leading AI companies.
• LM Studio has removed licensing restrictions to make its popular desktop application for running local LLMs completely free for commercial use, putting pressure on competing paid solutions and expanding access to local AI deployment.
• Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) has been released with significant updates, now supporting both image and video segmentation with improved accuracy and efficiency, making it a foundational tool for computer vision tasks.
• Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed DOTResize, a groundbreaking approach to model compression that uses discrete optimal transport to merge similar neurons, achieving up to 25% reduction in LLM width with minimal performance degradation.
• The "Awesome LLM Apps" repository has gained significant traction (331 stars in a single day), serving as a comprehensive collection of LLM applications with AI agents and RAG implementations using models from various providers.
BUSINESS
Funding & Investment
LangChain Raising New Round at $1 Billion Valuation (2025-07-08)
AI infrastructure startup LangChain is reportedly raising a new funding round that will value the company at approximately $1 billion. According to TechCrunch sources, the round is being led by IVP, which would make LangChain the latest AI unicorn. Source
Mistral AI in Talks to Raise $1 Billion (2025-07-08)
French AI startup Mistral is reportedly in discussions to raise up to $1 billion in equity funding. According to Bloomberg, the round may include Abu Dhabi's MGX fund among its investors. This significant capital raise would further solidify Mistral's position as one of Europe's leading AI companies. Source
M&A
CoreWeave Acquires Core Scientific in $9B Stock Deal (2025-07-07)
AI infrastructure provider CoreWeave has acquired data center provider Core Scientific in a stock deal valued at $9 billion. The acquisition significantly expands CoreWeave's data center capacity as demand for AI computing resources continues to grow. Source
Company Updates
Microsoft Partners with Replit (2025-07-08)
Coding platform Replit has announced a partnership with Microsoft, marking a significant shift from its previous alignment with Google Cloud. The collaboration is seen as mutually beneficial for both companies, with Replit gaining access to Microsoft's infrastructure while Microsoft extends its reach in the developer ecosystem. This deal represents a competitive loss for Google Cloud in the AI development space. Source
Meta Recruits Apple's Head of AI Models (2025-07-07)
Meta has reportedly hired Ruoming Pang, who previously led Apple's in-house team responsible for training AI foundation models that power Apple Intelligence and other on-device AI features. This high-profile recruitment highlights the intense competition for AI talent among tech giants. Source
Cursor Apologizes for Pricing Changes (2025-07-07)
AI coding assistant Cursor's CEO has issued an apology following user backlash over unclear changes to its pricing model that resulted in unexpected charges for some users. The incident highlights the challenges AI startups face in monetizing their services while maintaining user trust. Source
Market Analysis
AI Shopping Assistants Set to Surge During Prime Day (2025-07-08)
A new report indicates that generative AI will play a significantly larger role in online shopping during Amazon's Prime Day sale (July 8-11). The event is predicted to drive $23.8 billion in online spending across U.S. e-commerce retailers, with AI shopping assistants helping consumers navigate deals and make purchasing decisions. This trend demonstrates the growing integration of AI into e-commerce customer experiences. Source
MCP Adoption Faces Hurdles in Regulated Industries (2025-07-08)
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is gaining momentum in the AI industry, but financial institutions and other regulated sectors remain cautious about adoption. According to VentureBeat, concerns about Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements and regulatory compliance are slowing implementation in these industries, despite the protocol's growing popularity elsewhere. Source
Brex Adapts AI Tool Procurement Process (2025-07-06)
Financial technology company Brex has developed a new approach to testing and vetting AI tools, recognizing that traditional software procurement processes are inadequate in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The company now embraces what it calls the "messiness" of AI adoption, highlighting how businesses are adapting their operational practices to keep pace with AI innovation. Source
PRODUCTS
LM Studio Now Free for Commercial Use
- Source: LM Studio Blog
- Company: LM Studio (startup)
- Date: (2025-07-08)
- Summary: LM Studio, one of the leading desktop applications for running local LLMs, announced that it is now free for commercial use. This significant policy change removes licensing restrictions that previously limited business usage. LM Studio has become popular for its user-friendly interface and robust performance in running open-source AI models locally. This move puts pressure on competing paid solutions like Msty. The announcement has generated positive response in communities like r/LocalLLaMA, though some users express concerns about trusting the software with sensitive internal files in enterprise environments.
Notable AI Research Highlights
Several significant AI research papers have gained attention in the machine learning community:
- ARC-AGI without Pretraining
- Source: Project Website
- Date: (2025)
- Summary: This unconventional paper (published as a website rather than PDF) demonstrates novel approaches to solving the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus without traditional pretraining methods, generating significant discussion in r/MachineLearning.
- Extracting Interpretability Features
- Source: Anthropic Research
- Company: Anthropic (established player)
- Date: (2025)
- Summary: This influential paper from Anthropic explores techniques for extracting interpretable features from large language models, with its "golden gate" concept receiving particular attention in the research community.
- Quiet-STaR: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Think Before Speaking
- Source: arXiv
- Date: (2025-03)
- Summary: This research introduced the innovative concept of
and tokens to improve model reasoning, enabling LLMs to explicitly separate their reasoning process from their final outputs.
Creative AI Applications
- Smooth Lock-On Stabilization with Wan2.1 VACE Outpainting
- Source: Reddit Demonstration
- Date: (2025-07-08)
- Summary: A notable advancement in stable diffusion image generation techniques showing improved stabilization and outpainting capabilities with the Wan2.1 VACE model, demonstrated through a visual example that has received significant community attention with over 400 upvotes.
TECHNOLOGY
Open Source Projects
Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2)
Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 brings significant updates to the popular image segmentation framework. The repository now includes support for both image and video segmentation with improved accuracy and efficiency. The project remains highly active with recent updates focusing on detailed documentation of SAM 2's capabilities. With over 50,000 stars, it continues to be a foundational tool for computer vision tasks.
Awesome LLM Apps
This comprehensive collection of LLM applications with AI agents and RAG implementations has gained significant traction, adding 331 stars today alone. The repository organizes examples using models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-source alternatives. With over 49,000 stars and 5,600 forks, it serves as a valuable reference for developers building practical AI applications across different platforms and model providers.
Models & Datasets
GLM-4.1V-9B-Thinking
THUDM's multimodal model combines image-text processing with advanced reasoning capabilities. With over 15,000 downloads, this model stands out for its "thinking" approach to visual reasoning tasks. The model supports both English and Chinese languages and is built on the GLM-4-9B-0414 base architecture with MIT licensing.
FLUX.1-Kontext-dev
Black Forest Labs' diffusion model has gained exceptional popularity with nearly 190,000 downloads and over 1,400 likes. This image generation and image-to-image model is notable for its integration with a popular community-driven portrait generation space, demonstrating its practical applications for creative tasks.
TTS-1.6b-en_fr
Kyutai's text-to-speech model supports both English and French languages and has accumulated nearly 16,000 downloads. Based on Moshi architecture, this model represents continued progress in multilingual TTS capabilities with a CC-BY-4.0 license that enables broad adoption.
Pliny HackAPrompt Dataset
A specialized dataset for testing model safety against prompt injections, jailbreaks, and other red-teaming scenarios. With nearly 500 downloads since its recent release on July 7th, this dataset fills an important need for researchers and developers focusing on LLM security and alignment.
FineWeb-2
One of the most downloaded datasets on Hugging Face with over 360,000 downloads, FineWeb-2 provides multilingual web text data for training language models. The dataset's extensive language coverage and structured format make it particularly valuable for developing general-purpose foundation models.
Developer Tools & Infrastructure
FLUX.1-Kontext-portrait Space
This Gradio-based demo showcases the capabilities of the FLUX.1-Kontext model specifically for portrait generation. The space has garnered 127 likes and represents how specialized interfaces can make advanced generative models more accessible to users without technical expertise.
ThinkSound Space
An interactive demo for audio generation and processing built with Gradio. This space demonstrates innovative approaches to audio AI, making complex sound generation and manipulation techniques available through a user-friendly interface.
Open LLM Leaderboard
With over 13,000 likes, this Docker-based space provides standardized evaluations of language models across code, math, and general language tasks. The leaderboard has become an industry reference point for comparing model performance, offering transparent and reproducible benchmarks for the AI community.
RESEARCH
Paper of the Day
DOTResize: Reducing LLM Width via Discrete Optimal Transport-based Neuron Merging (2025-07-06)
Authors: Neha Verma, Kenton Murray, Kevin Duh Institution: Johns Hopkins University
This paper introduces a groundbreaking approach to model compression by directly addressing computational redundancy in large Transformer models. DOTResize stands out for its mathematically principled method that uses discrete optimal transport to identify and merge similar neurons, reducing model width while maintaining performance. The technique is particularly significant because it achieves up to 25% reduction in width with minimal performance degradation and can be applied to both pre-trained and fine-tuned models without additional training data.
Notable Research
WebSynthesis: World-Model-Guided MCTS for Efficient WebUI-Trajectory Synthesis (2025-07-06)
Authors: Yifei Gao, Junhong Ye, Jiaqi Wang, Jitao Sang
This paper introduces a world-model-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search approach for generating synthetic web interaction trajectories, enabling more efficient training of web agents without expensive real-world interactions.
X-Planner for Complex Instruction-Based Image Editing (2025-07-07)
Authors: Chun-Hsiao Yeh et al.
The researchers present X-Planner, a Multimodal LLM-based planning system that effectively bridges user intent with editing model capabilities, addressing challenges like poor identity preservation and unintended edits in complex image editing tasks.
LERa: Replanning with Visual Feedback in Instruction Following (2025-07-07)
Authors: Svyatoslav Pchelintsev et al.
LERa (Look, Explain, Replan) introduces a novel Visual Language Model-based replanning approach that enables robots to adapt to real-world changes using only RGB images and natural language instructions, without requiring additional sensors.
VerifyLLM: LLM-Based Pre-Execution Task Plan Verification for Robots (2025-07-07)
Authors: Danil S. Grigorev, Alexey K. Kovalev, Aleksandr I. Panov
This paper proposes an architecture for automatically verifying high-level robotic task plans before execution, leveraging LLMs to convert abstract plans into concrete action sequences and verify their feasibility, significantly reducing errors.
LOOKING AHEAD
As we move through Q3 2025, the convergence of multimodal foundation models with specialized domain expertise is clearly accelerating. Watch for the emergence of industry-specific AI systems that combine generalist capabilities with deep vertical knowledge—particularly in healthcare and materials science. These systems will likely achieve breakthrough performance by Q4 2025. Additionally, the regulatory landscape is poised for significant evolution as the EU's AI Act implementation enters its critical phase, with similar frameworks expected from the US by early 2026. Companies balancing innovation with compliance will gain strategic advantage in this new era where AI governance becomes as important as technical capability.