LlamaCon 2025, RF-DETR, Cursor Free Plan
Vision Geek Newsletter #11
Hello there,
Welcome to the next edition of Vision Geek Newsletter, covering the essential news and learning resources in Computer Vision and Machine Learning, read by 1000+ Computer Vision practitioners.
Let’s get into it.
LlamaCon 2025
Meta recently held it’s first-ever LlamaCon focusing entirely on Llama models, open source initiatives and the company’s work in AI.
Key Announcements & Highlights
The conference kicked off with the showcase of the capabilities and strengths of the recently released natively multimodal Llama 4 models.
A new standalone Meta AI app for users available on Android & iOS.
Launch of new Llama API, hosted on their cloud which simplifies access to Llama models for inference in collaboration with Cerebras and Groq to deliver faster performance.
The team also shared the technical details and behind the scene decisions while building Llama 4 models and the API.
And showcased one-click API key generation, interactive playground for testing, SDKs for Python & TypeScript, compatibility with OpenAI SDKs, support for Llama 4 variants like Scout and Maverick and tools for fine-tuning the models with custom dataset.
Meta has unveiled a suite of open-source Llama Protection tools and Llama Defenders Program aimed at improving AI safety and security.
And announced 10 international recipients of the second Llama Impact Grants. With over $1.5 million USD awarded, these grants support companies, startups, and universities using Llama to drive transformative change.
Announced that SAM 3 will be released this summer with support for text based prompts for segmenting objects/regions in images & videos whereas SAM 2 supported only clicks(points), masks and bounding boxes as prompts and showed a simple demo of SAM 3.
Mark Zuckerberg’s a couple of fireside chats with Ali Ghodsi (CEO of Databricks) and Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) and a Hackathon.
RF-DETR by Roboflow
Roboflow has recently released RF-DETR, real-time object detection transformer-based architecture under the Apache 2.0 license.
RF-DETR is the first real-time model to exceed 60 AP on the Microsoft COCO benchmark however models like DINO and SwinV2-G achieve slightly higher mAP scores on COCO, RF-DETR distinguishes itself by combining high accuracy with real time performance, making it particularly suitable for applications requiring both speed and precision. It also achieves state-of-the-art performance on RF100-VL, an object detection benchmark that measures model domain adaptability to real world problems.
The model comes in two variants: RF-DETR Base (29M parameters) and RF-DETR Large (129M parameters). RF-DETR is developed for projects that need a model that can run high speeds with a high degree of accuracy, and often on limited compute (like on the edge or low latency).
Key Benefits
Converges faster than other models as pretraining helps.
No NMS (smoother predictions between video frames and better understanding of overlapping objects)
Gets the same results on cheaper hardware as LayerNorm is used instead of BatchNorm
Multi Resolution training.
RT-DETR (Baidu) vs RF-DETR (Roboflow):
Both RT-DETR and RF-DETR works on No NMS.
In terms of speed, RT-DETR runs Up to 114 FPS whereas RF-DETR runs upto 25+ FPS.
RF-DETR is designed for easier domain transfer & fine-tuning while RT-DETR transferability is not heavily optimized for small custom datasets.
RT-DETR is best suited when speed is of high priority than accuracy and RF-DETR is best suited when accuracy is of high priority while maintaining real time speed.
Cursor Free Plan
Cursor, the AI coding assistant built on top of VS Code, now offers a free student plan. You will have access to all Pro features for a year. This includes 500 fast premium requests per month and unlimited slow premium requests which usually costs $20 per month.
With this plan, students get access to key features like:
AI pair programming (like GitHub Copilot)
Smart code suggestions and autocompletion
Inline code explanations and refactoring
Help with debugging and navigating large codebases
Cursor is especially useful for beginners and those working on personal or academic projects in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and more. To get access, you’ll need to verify with a valid .edu email or upload proof of enrollment. Once approved, you’ll unlock premium features at no cost for a year.
However Cursor has restricted its free student plan in various regions including India. Cursor’s team says “we are working hard with our partners to bring this to more students soon”.
Students in the restricted regions can checkout other offers such as GitHub Copilot Student Pack, Microsoft Azure for Students in the meantime. Hopefully, as the program matures and verification workflows improve more regions will be added to the free-Pro list.