Meta’s Manhattan-sized AI play

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI’s Stargate Project be hogging the AI infrastructure headlines, but Meta and Zuck just made a Manhattan-sized move of their very own.

But with Chinese models achieving similar results on shoestring budgets, are these billion-dollar bets about to reshape AI completely or reveal a large spending bubble?

Friendly reminder: Our newsletter continues to be slowly moving to a brand new email address. Add [email protected] to your contacts to make sure you keep receiving our emails.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Zuckerberg declares $65B AI investment plan

• Qwen launches model upgrades, 1M token support

• Tips on how to run DeepSeek R1 offline in your computer

• Perplexity AI proposes latest TikTok U.S. merger

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

META

🏗️ Zuckerberg declares $65B AI investment plan

The Rundown: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just announced a large $60-65B capital expenditure plan for 2025 focused on AI infrastructure, aiming to position Meta AI because the leading assistant and Llama 4 because the state-of-the-art model within the industry.

The small print:

• The corporate plans to deploy roughly 1GW of compute power in 2025, constructing a datacenter so large it could cover a good portion of Manhattan.

• Meta goals to amass over 1.3M GPUs by year-end, marking one among the biggest AI hardware deployments globally.

• The investment represents a ~70% jump from 2024’s projected spending, with Zuckerberg also predicting that Meta AI will reach 1B users this yr.

• The news comes on the heels of DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI’s Stargate Project reveal, which is able to inject $500B into U.S. AI infrastructure projects.

Why it matters: The AI infrastructure race is on, with Meta and OpenAI each pouring unfathomable amounts of capital into the creation of giant latest U.S. datacenters. The spending also comes despite DeepSeek’s recent R1 breakthrough — with the Chinese model acting on par with industry leaders despite a fraction of the training costs.

TOGETHER WITH PROJECT IDX

🚀 Boost your development with Cloud + AI

The Rundown: Project IDX offers a whole cloud development environment integrated with Google’s Gemini AI — all directly inside your browser.

With Project IDX, you get:

• A Linux-based virtual machine which you could access anytime, anywhere

• Native apps in browser to construct and test Flutter/React Native apps with a built-in Android Emulator

• Pre-loaded environments to start coding immediately with popular frameworks

Rise up to five workspaces and speed up your development today.

ALIBABA

🤖 Qwen launches model upgrades, 1M token support

The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen team just unveiled two latest open-source models able to processing as much as 1M tokens, alongside significant speed improvements and a revamped Chat interface.

The small print:

• The brand new Qwen2.5-1M series includes 7B and 14B parameter models, each supporting 1M token context lengths while maintaining accuracy.

• Qwen deploys a custom vLLM-inference framework, delivering as much as 7x faster processing than other long-context systems.

• In tests, the Qwen-1M models outperformed other long-context models like Llama-3, GLM-4, and GPT-4 across complex long-text tasks.

• The discharge also features a latest Qwen Chat v0.2 upgrade, adding web search, text-to-video generation, and enhanced image capabilities.

Why it matters: Qwen’s open-source 1M models are a touch at whats to return across the industry — with Google’s Gemini (2M) and Flash 2.0 Considering (1M) already leading the way in which with massive input capabilities. The context increases, paired with faster processing, open up superhuman levels of knowledge evaluation and latest complex use cases.

AI TRAINING

💻 Tips on how to run DeepSeek R1 offline in your computer

The Rundown: DeepSeek recently released distilled versions of its R1 model, which may match and even outperform GPT-4o and run completely free in your computer.

Step-by-step:

1. Download LM Studio from their website to your operating system.

2. Open the app and click on the magnifying glass to download a model (beneficial: DeepSeek R1 Distill series).

3. Load your model from the highest dropdown menu within the chat interface and begin chatting.

Hot tip: These models run completely offline, so you need to use them anywhere, even without web access.

PRESENTED BY PROMPTQL

🧠 RAG with 100% accuracy

The Rundown: PromptQL transforms unpredictable AI into precise agentic intelligence, leveraging agentic planning to deliver a brand new paradigm of accuracy far beyond the standard 40-70% range of typical RAG and AI agents.

With PromptQL, you may construct agents that:

• Use dynamic planning to construct real-time strategies that adapt to changing data

• Have perfect memory to process data without context window limits

• Provide full transparency into every decision and output

Start with PromptQL today.

PERPLEXITY

💼 Perplexity AI proposes latest TikTok U.S. merger

The Rundown: Perplexity AI just revised its merger proposal for TikTok’s U.S. operations, introducing a brand new structure that will give the US government a big ownership stake within the social media giant.

The small print:

• The deal would create a brand new company called ‘NewCo’, combining Perplexity AI and TikTok US, potentially value as much as $300B after an IPO.

• Under the revised plan, the US government could acquire as much as 50% ownership — a key sticking point in President Donald Trump’s plan for handling the sale.

• TikTok’s current owner ByteDance would contribute the U.S. operations but keep the core advice algorithm under the proposal.

• Other rumored suitors include Elon Musk, Oracle, and Microsoft — with Trump temporarily restoring the app within the U.S. for 75 days to permit for negotiations.

Why it matters: Between its Android mobile assistant and up to date API launch, Perplexity is quickly evolving from its original answer engine to an AI powerhouse — but a merger with TikTok U.S. could be by far its biggest move yet. Nonetheless, with the opposite tech giants with deeper pockets (like Elon) circling, the plan still looks like a longshot.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Operator – OpenAI’s first agent for in-browser tasks

• 📱 Perplexity Assistant – Android agentic assistant able to controlling phone apps and performing complex tasks

• 📚 Citations – Allow Claude to ground answers in source documents and supply references

• 📣 WePost – Generate on-brand marketing with ease

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 📣 The Rundown – Marketing/Media Buyer

• 🤝 Lindy AI – Head of Community

• 📊 Weights & Biases – FP&A Associate, R&D (US)

• 🧱 Databricks – Solutions Architect

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

ElevenLabs is reportedly raising a $250M Series C at a $3B+ valuation, with demand surging for its AI voice synthesis and dubbing technology.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could enable humans to live 2x longer by 2030, with the tech compressing a century of research progress into 5-10 years.

xAI is reportedly developing a voice interface for its Grok iOS app with each proprietary and ElevenLabs voice options, also able to leveraging real-time data.

OpenAI expanded Canvas functionality in ChatGPT with latest rendering capabilities and o1 model support, also rolling out desktop app access across all subscription tiers.

Legendary musician Paul McCartney spoke out against the UK’s proposed AI copyright law changes, warning they might “rip off” musicians without compensation.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that advances in AI will eventually require changing the social contract, with “the entire structure of society up for debate and reconfiguration.”

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop on Tuesday at 1 PM EST and learn easy methods to turn ideas into original music with our next expert guest: Sara Adkins, Machine Learning Engineer and Artist in Residence at Suno.

RSVP here. Not a member yet? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

🤝 Share The Rundown, get rewards

We’ll at all times keep this text 100% free. To support our work, consider sharing The Rundown with your pals, and we’ll send you more free goodies.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team