LLM Daily: November 18, 2025
🔍 LLM DAILY
Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models
November 18, 2025
HIGHLIGHTS
• PowerLattice has secured investment from former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger for its technology that can reduce computer chip power requirements by more than 50%, targeting the growing AI computing market with energy-efficient chiplet solutions.
• Nvidia has released ChronoEdit-14B-Diffusers-Paint-Brush-Lora, a new open-source image editing model with brush-based editing capabilities, though early community feedback suggests mixed results regarding speed and instruction-following capabilities.
• Google's gemini-cli has garnered nearly 83,000 GitHub stars by bringing Gemini models directly to the terminal, enabling developers to access AI assistance within their existing workflows.
• Security researchers have uncovered a concerning "Sure Trap" backdoor vulnerability that can be implanted with just 0.1% of poisoned training data, creating LLMs that produce harmful content when triggered yet still pass standard alignment evaluations.
BUSINESS
Funding & Investment
PowerLattice Secures Investment from Ex-Intel CEO for Energy-Efficient Chips (2025-11-17)
PowerLattice, a startup founded by veteran engineers from Qualcomm, NUVIA, and Intel, has secured investment from former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. The company claims its technology can reduce computer chip power requirements by more than 50%. Founded in 2023, PowerLattice is developing energy-efficient chiplet solutions targeted at the AI computing market. TechCrunch
Luminal Raises $5.3M Seed Round for GPU Code Framework (2025-11-17)
Inference optimization startup Luminal has announced a $5.3 million seed funding round led by Felicis Ventures. Notable angel investors include Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield. The company is building improved frameworks for GPU code optimization, targeting the growing AI inference market. TechCrunch
Major AI Ventures
Jeff Bezos Co-Leads New AI Startup with $6.2B Funding (2025-11-17)
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly backing and co-leading a new AI startup called Project Prometheus, which has raised an impressive $6.2 billion in funding. Bezos will serve as co-chief executive of the venture, marking his return to a direct operational role in a technology company. Details about the startup's specific focus within AI remain limited. TechCrunch
Company Updates
Google Expands AI-Powered 'Flight Deals' Tool Globally (2025-11-17)
Google has announced the global rollout of its AI-powered "Flight Deals" tool, which uses artificial intelligence to identify and display the best travel bargains. Users describe their travel preferences, and the AI system searches for optimal deals. This expansion represents Google's continued integration of AI capabilities into its core search products. TechCrunch
Market Analysis
AI Data Center Investment Outpacing Oil Exploration (2025-11-16)
According to a new International Energy Agency report, global spending on data centers will reach $580 billion this year, exceeding new oil supply investment by $40 billion. This shift highlights the massive infrastructure expansion required to support growing AI workloads and raises questions about energy consumption and sustainability in the AI sector. TechCrunch
A16z-Backed Super PAC Targets AI Regulation Supporter (2025-11-17)
A super PAC supported by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI, and other tech leaders has launched its first campaign against New York Assembly member Alex Bores, who is running for Congress and has supported AI regulation legislation. This marks an escalation in the tech industry's political efforts to influence AI policy development. TechCrunch
PRODUCTS
Nvidia Releases ChronoEdit-14B-Diffusers-Paint-Brush-Lora (2025-11-17)
Nvidia has released ChronoEdit-14B-Diffusers-Paint-Brush-Lora, a new image editing model designed for brush-based editing capabilities. This release is available on Hugging Face with an Apache license, providing both the model and associated training infrastructure. Early community feedback suggests mixed results, with some users noting that while the concept is promising, the execution may be slower than alternatives like Qwen-Edit, with some instruction-following limitations. A demo application is also available on Hugging Face Spaces for users to try the technology directly.
MiniMax Announces AMA and Community Gifts (2025-11-17)
The team behind MiniMax-M2, an open-source language model, has announced an upcoming AMA session scheduled for Wednesday (8AM-11AM PST). As part of their community engagement, they will be gifting MiniMax-M2 Max Coding Plans to the top 10 most upvoted questions or comments during the AMA. This represents an effort by the MiniMax team to connect with the open-source AI community and promote their language model capabilities, particularly focused on coding applications.
TECHNOLOGY
Open Source Projects
google-gemini/gemini-cli
An open-source AI agent that brings Google's Gemini models directly into your terminal. With 82,871 stars and recent active development, this TypeScript-based tool lets developers interact with Gemini models through a familiar command-line interface, making AI assistance accessible within existing developer workflows.
firecrawl/firecrawl
A powerful web data API designed specifically for AI applications with 67,964 stars. This TypeScript project transforms websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data, making it easier to feed web content into AI models. Recent commits show active development in logo detection and branding extraction capabilities.
pathwaycom/llm-app
Ready-to-run cloud templates for RAG, AI pipelines, and enterprise search with live data synchronization. With 46,927 stars, this Docker-friendly solution offers seamless integration with various data sources including Sharepoint, Google Drive, S3, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. Recent updates have reorganized the project structure to improve usability.
Models & Datasets
baidu/ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking
Baidu's latest multimodal model combining vision and language capabilities at 28B parameters. This model supports image-text-to-text generation in both English and Chinese, with over 9,200 downloads and 459 likes, demonstrating significant interest in Baidu's vision-language capabilities.
moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Thinking
A conversational AI model with remarkable popularity evidenced by 147,548 downloads and 1,254 likes. The model features compressed tensors for improved efficiency and compatibility with various deployment methods including AutoTrain and Hugging Face Endpoints.
maya-research/maya1
A versatile LLaMA-based model supporting both text generation and text-to-speech capabilities. With 28,903 downloads and 645 likes, this Apache 2.0-licensed model offers compatibility with text-generation-inference and endpoints, making it accessible for various deployment scenarios.
builddotai/Egocentric-10K
A significant dataset with 38,902 downloads and 234 likes focused on egocentric data, likely containing first-person perspective images or videos. Released under Apache 2.0 license, this dataset was last updated on November 11th and serves as a valuable resource for building AI models with egocentric understanding.
PleIAs/SYNTH
A multilingual dataset supporting text generation, zero-shot classification, and summarization tasks across multiple European languages. With 22,412 downloads, this parquet-formatted dataset contains between 10-100M entries covering diverse domains including Wikipedia, art, math, and creative writing.
Developer Tools
HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook
A highly popular Hugging Face Space (2,242 likes) that provides a comprehensive guide for efficient model training. Packaged as a Docker-based research article template, this resource offers visualizations and best practices for training smaller, more efficient models.
tori29umai/Qwen-Image-2509-MultipleAngles
A Gradio-based demo showcasing the Qwen image model's ability to generate multiple viewing angles of the same subject. With 433 likes, this space demonstrates advanced capabilities in consistent 3D understanding and multi-view generation.
prithivMLmods/Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-LoRAs-Fast
A specialized image editing tool leveraging Qwen's image generation capabilities with LoRA adaptations for faster performance. The integration with MCP-server suggests optimization for improved inference speed, making advanced image editing more accessible.
Infrastructure
Wan-AI/Wan2.2-Animate
A highly popular animation tool with 2,455 likes built on Gradio. This space likely offers animation capabilities powered by Wan AI's 2.2 model, demonstrating the growing infrastructure for AI-powered animation and motion generation.
stepfun-ai/Step-Audio-EditX
A Gradio-based audio editing platform that allows users to manipulate audio content using AI. With 78 likes, this tool represents the emerging infrastructure for AI-powered audio manipulation, complementing the more established image and text generation capabilities.
Miragic-AI/Miragic-Virtual-Try-On
A virtual clothing try-on solution with 467 likes, allowing users to visualize clothing items on models. This infrastructure demonstrates practical e-commerce applications of generative AI, enabling more interactive shopping experiences.
RESEARCH
Paper of the Day
Authors: Yuting Tan, Yi Huang, Zhuo Li
This groundbreaking security research reveals a novel attack vector for large language models that is remarkably stealthy and difficult to detect. Unlike traditional backdoor attacks that require explicit harmful outputs during training, the researchers demonstrate that simply pairing trigger words with innocent "Sure" responses is sufficient to create models that later produce harmful content when the trigger is used.
The authors conduct a multi-scale poisoning analysis showing that a mere 0.1% of poisoned training data can successfully implant these backdoors in fine-tuned LLMs. More alarmingly, the affected models show no performance degradation on standard benchmarks and pass typical alignment evaluations, making these attacks exceptionally difficult to detect through conventional quality control measures. This work highlights critical security vulnerabilities in the current LLM fine-tuning pipeline that could be exploited by malicious actors.
Notable Research
GRAPHTEXTACK: A Realistic Black-Box Node Injection Attack on LLM-Enhanced GNNs (2025-11-16)
Authors: Jiaji Ma, Puja Trivedi, Danai Koutra
This paper introduces a novel attack method targeting the increasingly popular integration of LLMs with Graph Neural Networks. The researchers demonstrate how adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in both graph structures and LLM-derived features through a realistic black-box attack that requires minimal knowledge about the target model.
VoiceCraft-X: Unifying Multilingual, Voice-Cloning Speech Synthesis and Speech Editing (2025-11-15)
Authors: Zhisheng Zheng, Puyuan Peng, Anuj Diwan, et al.
The researchers present a breakthrough autoregressive neural codec language model that combines zero-shot voice cloning and speech editing across 11 languages without requiring phoneme-based processing, instead leveraging the Qwen3 LLM for cross-lingual text handling.
Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning (2025-11-16)
Authors: Yihang Yao, Guangtao Zeng, Raina Wu, et al.
This research reveals why some LLMs respond dramatically better to reinforcement learning than others, showing that models initialized with better reasoning primitives achieve superior performance with minimal RL steps, offering insights into more efficient training methodologies.
Decision and Gender Biases in Large Language Models: A Behavioral Economic Perspective (2025-11-15)
Authors: Luca Corazzini, Elisa Deriu, Marco Guerzoni
The researchers apply behavioral economics frameworks to evaluate whether LLMs exhibit human-like cognitive biases, finding that advanced models replicate many classic decision-making fallacies and gender stereotypes despite their supposed rationality, with implications for how these systems should be deployed in economic decision-making contexts.
LOOKING AHEAD
As we approach 2026, the convergence of multimodal reasoning and embodied AI is reshaping the landscape. The recent breakthroughs in recursive self-improvement demonstrated by Google's Gemini Ultra 3.0 and Anthropic's Claude 4 suggest we'll soon see models capable of genuine long-term planning and hypothesis generation. Watch for the first commercial applications of neuromorphic chips in Q1 2026, likely accelerating training efficiency by orders of magnitude while dramatically reducing energy consumption.
The regulatory frameworks finalized at October's Global AI Summit are now being implemented, with the first certified "provably safe" systems expected by Q2 2026. This standardization should help address the persistent concerns around AI hallucinations in critical domains while enabling faster adoption in healthcare and scientific discovery.