Trump & AI, Real-Time Worlds, GenAI Corporate Spending, & More

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

🇺🇸 Trump’s Election Win & AI

🤩 Meta’s Monstrous Llama 4 Training Cluster

🥸 GenAI Corporate Spending

😎 Google’s ‘Big Sleep’ Finds Serious Bug

📰 Other news from Microsoft & Anthropic

[TREND OF THE WEEK] Oasis, Creating Worlds in Real Time

NEWSREEL

Trump’s Election Win & AI

As you may know by now, Trump earned a decisive victory in this week’s US Presidential election. While I’m not from the US, let alone a political expert, this win impacts AI heavily, as media like The Times have called this election the ‘first AI election.’

While the real effect the Trump administration will have on AI is still pretty much to be defined, we can predict many outcomes already:

We should see a complete derogation of Joe Biden’s AI Executive Order, which forced companies’ training models to surpass GPT-4’s budget threshold, around 2.1×1025 FLOP (mathematical operations), or 21 trillion trillions of operations, to provide detailed information on the training run to the government.

If that feels like a lot of compute, it is… but nothing compared to what’s coming. According to EpochAI, we could see models trained with 200 quadrillion trillion (2×1029) operations by the decade's end.

To put that number into perspective, scientists estimate Earth has 7.5 sextillion grains of sand, or 75×1017. That theoretical model would be trained with the compute operations equivalent to the number of sand grains in… 26.6 billion Earths. That’s a lot of sand… I mean compute!

Considering that one of Trump’s biggest campaign slogans was ‘America First,’ we should see severe deregulation in energy generation and transmission capacity requirements. In other words, we will see a massive uptick in data center build-outs inside the US. Trump definitely wants to see AI models not only designed in the US but trained and served inside its borders.

Discontinuation of the CHIPS Act, a set of hefty subsidies, especially for US chip manufacturers like Intel to revamp their decaying businesses. Trump called this act “very expensive,” so we could expect more deregulation and tax credits (in line with point two) than subsidies.

But the biggest ‘if’ comes from open-source. Trump is notoriously anti-China. Therefore, if AI models become a matter of national security, Trump could enforce much tighter scrutiny on open source to prevent it from falling into China's hands. And news like the ones coming from Meta won’t help.

But this is such a crucial topic that we will devote this Sunday’s newsletter issue to delving into the Trump era's winners and losers.

LLM TRAINING

Meta’s Monstrous Llama 4 Training Cluster

In Meta’s earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that they were training Llama 4 “on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100 AI GPUs, or bigger than anything that I’ve seen reported for what others are doing.”

He then mentioned Llama 4 would have new modalities, stronger reasoning, and be much faster. That’s a big claim. The previous generation, Llama 3.1 models, were trained on a 24k NVIDIA H100 cluster, a…

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