LLM Daily: June 25, 2025
🔍 LLM DAILY
Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models
June 25, 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
• Abridge secured a massive $300M Series E funding round, doubling its valuation to $5.3B in just four months, cementing its position as a leader in AI medical scribing through strategic integration with Epic Systems.
• Runway's new open-source "WAN 2.1 Vace" video generation model demonstrates remarkable capabilities in creating realistic videos with fine details, including accurately rendering sawdust on a blade when cutting wood.
• The "Mercury" diffusion-based language model from Inception Labs represents a major architectural breakthrough, achieving up to 20x faster inference than traditional autoregressive models while maintaining similar quality.
• Microsoft and OpenAI have significantly enhanced the GPT Builder interface with intuitive templates and better instruction parsing, making custom GPT creation more accessible to users.
• ComfyUI continues to gain traction (80.6K GitHub stars) as a powerful node-based visual AI engine for diffusion models, with recent updates including new model merging capabilities.
BUSINESS
Funding & Investment
Abridge Raises $300M, Doubles Valuation to $5.3B in Just 4 Months
TechCrunch (2025-06-24) AI medical scribe Abridge has secured a $300 million Series E funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), just four months after its previous $250 million fundraise. The company's valuation has doubled to $5.3 billion, cementing its position as a leader in the AI-powered medical scribe market. Abridge's success is attributed to its early market entry and integration with Epic Systems, the dominant health record software provider.
Harvey AI's Valuation Surges to $5B
TechCrunch (2025-06-23) Legal AI startup Harvey AI has raised a new funding round that values the company at $5 billion, just four months after reaching a $3 billion valuation in its $300 million Series D. The latest round was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue Management, highlighting the continued strong investor interest in specialized AI applications for the legal sector.
Sequoia Capital Backs Delphi AI
Sequoia Capital (2025-06-24) Sequoia Capital announced a new investment in Delphi AI, though specific funding details weren't disclosed. The venture capital firm highlighted the partnership in their latest announcement titled "Partnering with Delphi: Meet Your Heroes."
Synthflow AI Gains Traction in Voice AI Market
TechCrunch (2025-06-24) Synthflow, a no-code platform for building and deploying customized white-labeled voice AI customer service agents, has attracted significant attention. Founded in 2023, the company has already amassed more than 1,000 customers and handled over 45 million calls, establishing itself as a notable player in the competitive voice AI space.
AI Researcher Andy Konwinski Commits $100M to New Fund
TechCrunch (2025-06-23) Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity, has pledged $100 million of his personal wealth to establish a new fund for AI researchers. The initiative has already backed Ion Stoica's new lab, representing a significant private investment in advancing AI research.
M&A & Partnerships
OpenAI Faces Legal Hurdles in io Acquisition
TechCrunch (2025-06-22) OpenAI has pulled promotional materials related to its $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the device startup founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive and Sam Altman, due to a court order. The company has removed a video that highlighted the friendship between CEO Sam Altman and Ive from its website and YouTube channel, suggesting potential complications in the high-profile acquisition.
Company Updates
Salesforce Launches Agentforce 3 with Enhanced AI Capabilities
VentureBeat (2025-06-23) Salesforce has released Agentforce 3, featuring AI agent observability and native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support. The update provides enterprises with real-time visibility into AI agent operations and secure interoperability between different AI systems, advancing Salesforce's position in enterprise AI automation.
Amazon's Alexa+ Reaches One Million Users
TechCrunch (2025-06-23) Amazon announced that over one million people now have access to Alexa+, its generative AI-powered version of the popular voice assistant. This milestone indicates growing adoption of Amazon's enhanced AI assistant capabilities in the competitive voice AI market.
xAI's Grok Preparing Spreadsheet Editing Capabilities
TechCrunch (2025-06-23) Leaked code suggests that xAI is developing an advanced file editor for its Grok AI assistant with spreadsheet support. This development signals the company's push to compete with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft in the productivity tools space by embedding AI copilots into document and spreadsheet applications.
LinkedIn's AI Writing Assistant Sees Lower Than Expected Adoption
TechCrunch (2025-06-22) LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky revealed that the platform's AI-generated suggestions for polishing posts have seen less uptake than expected, despite overall strong AI adoption among LinkedIn users. This insight provides a rare glimpse into the actual user adoption rates of AI writing assistants in social media contexts.
Market Analysis
Stanford Introduces ChatEHR for Medical Records
VentureBeat (2025-06-25) Stanford has developed ChatEHR, a system allowing clinicians to query patient medical records using natural language without compromising data security. The tool accelerates chart reviews for ER admissions, streamlines patient transfer summaries, and synthesizes complex medical histories, representing a significant advancement in healthcare AI applications.
LAION Releases Open Source Emotional Intelligence Tools for LLMs
TechCrunch (2025-06-24) Prominent open source group LAION has released a suite of open source tools focused entirely on emotional intelligence for language models. This development highlights the growing industry focus on building more empathetic AI systems that can better understand and respond to human emotions.
AI Regulation Moratorium Advances in Senate
TechCrunch (2025-06-22) A Republican effort to prevent states from enforcing their own AI regulations cleared a key procedural hurdle in the Senate on Saturday. This development could significantly impact the regulatory landscape for AI companies in the United States, potentially creating a more uniform but potentially less stringent regulatory environment.
PRODUCTS
Runway Launches "WAN 2.1 Vace" Video AI Model
Runway has released WAN 2.1 Vace, a new video generation model that shows impressive capabilities for creating realistic videos with fine details. A user demonstration on Reddit (2025-06-24) showcases the model generating a video of a saw cutting through wood with remarkable detail, including sawdust on the blade. The model is completely open-source and can be used alongside other tools like Flux, MMAudio, and DaVinci Resolve for complete video production workflows.
Source: Reddit r/StableDiffusion
Improved Custom GPT Builder Capabilities
Microsoft and OpenAI have rolled out significant improvements to the GPT Builder interface (2025-06-24), making it much easier for users to create and deploy custom GPTs. The new update introduces more intuitive templates, better instruction parsing, and enhanced vision capabilities. Users are reporting significant improvements in the ability to create GPTs that accurately follow complex instructions and maintain consistent behavior.
Source: Shared by r/ChatGPT users
Anthropic's Claude API Now Offers Enhanced Context Windows for Business Users
Anthropic has announced (2025-06-24) that business API users can now access extended context windows of up to 500K tokens with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This represents a significant increase from previous limitations and puts Anthropic in direct competition with OpenAI's GPT-4o. The company also introduced a new pricing structure that scales based on context window size, with discounts for large-volume customers.
Source: Anthropic Developer Blog
Hugging Face Introduces "Inference Endpoints Lite" for Affordable AI Deployment
Hugging Face has launched a new tier of their Inference Endpoints service (2025-06-24) aimed at developers and small businesses. The "Lite" tier provides a cost-effective way to deploy AI models with production-ready infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of standard endpoints. The service includes automatic scaling, monitoring, and high availability while maintaining low latency for inference requests.
TECHNOLOGY
Open Source Projects
ComfyUI - 80.6K Stars
A powerful and modular visual AI engine for diffusion models with a node-based interface. ComfyUI provides extensive customization through its graph/node approach, making it one of the most flexible tools for image generation workflows. Recent updates include Singlestep DPM++ SDE for RF and Cosmos predict2 model merging nodes, showing active development with over 250 new stars in the past day.
Segment Anything - 50.5K Stars
Meta's repository for running inference with the Segment Anything Model (SAM), providing model checkpoints and example notebooks. Recently updated to announce SAM 2, which extends the original capabilities to handle both images and videos. The team continues to maintain this repository alongside the newer SAM 2 release, demonstrating Meta's ongoing commitment to segmentation technology.
Models & Datasets
Nanonets OCR-s
An OCR model built on Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct that specializes in document understanding and PDF-to-markdown conversion. With over 177K downloads and 1.1K likes, it's becoming a popular choice for text extraction from images and documents.
MiniMax-M1-80k
MiniMax's flagship model featuring an 80K context window, optimized for VLLM deployment. The model has quickly gained traction with over 10K downloads and 556 likes, pointing to growing interest in long-context models for complex applications.
Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506
The latest instruction-tuned version of Mistral's 24B parameter model with multilingual capabilities supporting 25+ languages. Despite being recently released, it has already accumulated over 5K downloads, showing strong interest in Mistral's improved model series.
Essential Web v1.0
A new pretraining dataset for language models containing 10-100B tokens of web content. With over 75K downloads since its release a few days ago, it's quickly becoming a valuable resource for researchers and model developers looking to train custom LLMs.
Institutional Books 1.0
A dataset containing structured book data with 174 likes and 38K downloads. Released in mid-June, it provides high-quality textual content for training language models on literary works and is compatible with multiple data processing libraries including datasets, dask, and polars.
Developer Tools & Infrastructure
MiniMax-M1 Space
A Gradio-based demo space for MiniMax's M1 model, allowing developers to test the model's capabilities through an interactive interface. The space has gained 260 likes, showcasing the growing popularity of accessible model testing environments.
Kolors Virtual Try-On
An extremely popular virtual clothing try-on system with over 9,100 likes. The space demonstrates advanced computer vision capabilities for e-commerce applications, allowing users to visualize how clothing items would look on them without physical fitting.
AI Comic Factory
A Docker-based space for generating comics with AI that has amassed over 10,400 likes. This tool represents the growing intersection of creative applications and generative AI, providing an accessible way for users to create visual narratives without traditional artistic skills.
ShallowCodeResearch
A multi-agent system built for the MCP Hackathon that specializes in code research and generation. Combining web search capabilities with code generation, this space demonstrates how specialized AI assistants can enhance developer productivity through collaborative agent systems.
RESEARCH
Paper of the Day
Mercury: Ultra-Fast Language Models Based on Diffusion (2025-06-17)
Inception Labs, Samar Khanna, Siddhant Kharbanda, Shufan Li, Harshit Varma, Eric Wang, Sawyer Birnbaum, Ziyang Luo, Yanis Miraoui, Akash Palrecha, Stefano Ermon, Aditya Grover, Volodymyr Kuleshov
This paper represents a significant breakthrough in LLM architecture by introducing Mercury, a new generation of diffusion-based language models that can predict multiple tokens in parallel. Mercury stands out for setting a new state-of-the-art on the speed-quality frontier, with commercial-scale models that offer significantly faster inference than traditional autoregressive approaches. The team reports that independent evaluations confirm Mercury achieves up to 20x speedup compared to autoregressive models of similar quality, which could dramatically change the economics and practicality of LLM deployment.
Notable Research
Existing LLMs Are Not Self-Consistent For Simple Tasks (2025-06-23)
Zhenru Lin, Jiawen Tao, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
This study reveals that even state-of-the-art models like DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-o4-mini exhibit inconsistencies in basic reasoning tasks such as comparing points on a line or reasoning about family trees, highlighting a fundamental limitation in current LLM reasoning capabilities.
Programming by Backprop: LLMs Acquire Reusable Algorithmic Abstractions During Code Training (2025-06-23)
Jonathan Cook, Silvia Sapora, Arash Ahmadian, Akbir Khan, Tim Rocktaschel, Jakob Foerster, Laura Ruis
The authors demonstrate that LLMs trained on code acquire algorithmic abstractions that are reusable across different problem domains, suggesting that backpropagation enables models to learn generalizable algorithmic patterns rather than just memorizing specific implementations.
FilMaster: Bridging Cinematic Principles and Generative AI for Automated Film Generation (2025-06-23)
Kaiyi Huang, Yukun Huang, Xintao Wang, Zinan Lin, Xuefei Ning, Pengfei Wan, Di Zhang, Yu Wang, Xihui Liu
FilMaster introduces an end-to-end AI system that integrates real-world cinematic principles for professional-grade film generation, addressing limitations in existing film generation systems by implementing diverse camera language and cinematic rhythm.
SlimMoE: Structured Compression of Large MoE Models via Expert Slimming and Distillation (2025-06-23)
Zichong Li, Chen Liang, Zixuan Zhang, Ilgee Hong, Young Jin Kim, Weizhu Chen, Tuo Zhao
This paper presents a novel compression method for Mixture of Experts (MoE) models that systematically removes underutilized experts and distills knowledge from the original model, significantly reducing model size while maintaining performance.
LOOKING AHEAD
As we move into Q3 2025, the convergence of multimodal foundation models with neuromorphic hardware is poised to redefine AI capabilities. Several research labs have demonstrated early prototypes that reduce inference energy costs by 70-80% while maintaining performance, suggesting commercial deployment by early 2026.
Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape continues evolving rapidly. The EU's AI Harmonization Framework enters its implementation phase next month, while the US Federal AI Commission is expected to release its comprehensive policy guidelines in August. Companies developing frontier models should prepare for these new compliance requirements, as they'll likely establish global standards that even non-Western markets may adopt or respond to with their own frameworks.