Welcome to AI Decoded, Quick Firm’s weekly e-newsletter that breaks down crucial information on this planet of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior author at Quick Firm, overlaying rising tech, AI, and tech coverage.
This week, I’m specializing in Elon Musk’s choice to lease the computing capability at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 information middle to Anthropic. I additionally have a look at what a brand new Atlantic exposé on David Sacks says about Silicon Valley’s alliance with Trump, and a benchmark that’s stumping prime AI coding brokers.
Signal as much as obtain this text each week by way of electronic mail here. And you probably have feedback on this situation and/or concepts for future ones, drop me a line at [email protected], and comply with me on X (previously Twitter) @thesullivan.
Why Grok is promoting compute to Anthropic
Whereas all people else within the AI area scrambles to lock down computing energy, xAI’s Grok fashions are apparently getting used so little relative to friends that the corporate can dump the capability of total information facilities, “colossal” ones at that.
Anthropic said Tuesday it had signed an settlement with SpaceX to make use of all of the computing capability in SpaceX’s Colossus 1 information middle in Memphis. (SpaceX owns xAI.) The deal will give Anthropic entry to greater than 300 megawatts of computing capability, or greater than 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Anthropic says the extra capability shall be used to serve its Claude Professional ($20 per thirty days) and Claude Max ($100 to $200 per thirty days) subscribers.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he gave his much-sought ethical stamp of approval to Anthropic. “By means of background for individuals who care, I spent a whole lot of time final week with senior members of the Anthropic workforce to grasp what they do to make sure Claude is nice for humanity and was impressed,” Musk said in an X post. “Everybody I met was extremely competent and cared a fantastic deal about doing the proper factor. Nobody set off my evil detector.”
Musk says xAI had already shifted its coaching workloads to Colossus 2, releasing up Colossus 1 for Anthropic’s use. Anthropic says it’s going to use the ability primarily for inference, or the processing required to reply to consumer prompts in actual time.
The partnership might finally prolong past Earth. Anthropic says it has additionally been discussing plans with Musk and SpaceX to develop a number of gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity. Area-based AI information facilities maintain apparent attraction as a result of the cost of cooling servers would primarily disappear. However main technical hurdles stay, particularly round reliably transmitting huge quantities of information between orbiting infrastructure and Earth.
Musk’s willingness to arm Anthropic with important computing energy may additionally have one thing to do along with his hatred of Anthropic rival OpenAI, and his dislike of OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Musk sued OpenAI, claiming the corporate’s management betrayed its unique nonprofit mission to develop AGI for the advantage of humanity moderately than for revenue.
Trump’s discount with Silicon Valley on AI could also be weakening
The Atlantic’s George Packer, in a new article about former White Home “crypto and AI czar” David Sacks, sheds extra gentle on how and why Sacks and different Valley elites went full MAGA earlier than the 2024 election. Now there are indicators that the primary factor Silicon Valley wished in alternate for its help could also be in jeopardy.
Silicon Valley’s most popular model of its MAGA conversion story is that influential VC Marc Andreessen met with representatives of the Biden administration and was informed the administration meant to closely regulate AI in order that only some large AI labs, and no startups, would have the ability to comply and survive. Andreessen mentioned Biden wished to “nationalize or destroy” Silicon Valley. He mentioned Biden wished to kill the complete cryptocurrency business. He mentioned he and his companion Ben Horowitz determined to help MAGA proper after that assembly.
Biden officers dispute Andreessen’s account of what was mentioned. However Andreessen’s model was sufficient to set a broader shift in movement amongst tech elites. Sacks held a fundraiser for Donald Trump in June 2024 in San Francisco’s rich Pacific Heights neighborhood. After speaking with Trump on the occasion and on the All-In podcast, Sacks mentioned: “All of his instincts are Let’s empower the personal sector; let’s reduce laws; let’s make taxes cheap; let’s get the neatest folks within the nation; let’s have peace offers; let’s have progress.”
What Sacks and others had been actually after was a promise of AI deregulation and extra tax cuts. They bought the tax cuts, and thus far the Trump administration has labored onerous to stifle authorities investigations or laws concentrating on the tech business. Some states have handed legal guidelines requiring authorities oversight, however the administration has been making an attempt to preempt such legal guidelines or problem them in court docket.
Packer means that Sacks, Andreessen, Horowitz, and different Valley elites may additionally share one thing in widespread with a lot of MAGA: They’re white males witnessing a lack of standing in society. “Andreessen was keen to pay excessive taxes and help liberal causes and candidates so long as he was considered a hero,” Packer writes.
However Silicon Valley’s fall from grace is just not the fault of Democrats, Biden, or “wokism”; it’s the results of authorities and society slowly realizing that many Silicon Valley elites are usually not truly pushed by idealistic notions of “making the world higher.” As an alternative, they’ve repeatedly proven a willingness to unleash applied sciences they know could also be dangerous. The clearest instance is Meta, which the federal government largely allowed to manage itself whereas shielding it from many consumer lawsuits through Section 230, solely to look at social media platforms contribute to disinformation, political polarization, and harms to youngsters.
However nothing is everlasting with Trump, as so many others have came upon, and agreements that not present instant worth could be rapidly deserted.
The White Home announced this week that it’s contemplating a requirement that authorities officers “vet” new AI fashions earlier than they are often launched. Group Trump was apparently spooked by two issues. An AI mannequin from an organization it not too long ago declared a supply-chain danger, Anthropic, developed a mannequin known as Mythos that may establish software program vulnerabilities at scale and devise methods to use them. In the meantime, backlash in opposition to the tech business’s huge information middle buildout is turning into more and more unpopular with components of the MAGA base and will develop into a significant GOP legal responsibility within the midterms.
Perhaps tech elites and MAGA don’t combine fairly in addition to both aspect as soon as thought.
Meet the brand new benchmark that’s soundly defeating coding brokers
Maybe probably the most consequential utility of generative AI fashions thus far has been software program engineering, the place brokers generate code and more and more make high-level architectural selections. However how will we inform how good an AI software program engineer actually is? Till now, the business has largely relied on benchmark checks equivalent to SWE-Bench, which consider fashions on comparatively well-defined duties like fixing bugs or implementing a single function. Now the builders behind SWE-Bench have launched a a lot more durable take a look at known as ProgramBench.
The benchmark is tough as a result of the AI agent has to motive strategically concerning the optimum structure and programming language wanted to breed the efficiency of every of the 200 take a look at packages. As soon as an agent finishes constructing a codebase, the benchmark runs roughly 248,000 checks to measure how carefully the recreated software program matches the unique conduct.
To date, the entire main fashions examined on ProgramBench, together with Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7, Google’s Gemini 3 Professional, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, have scored big fat zeros. In different phrases, none had been capable of absolutely full the take a look at builds. A number of fashions, nevertheless, had been capable of full parts of them.
The outcomes counsel that present AI coding tools nonetheless are usually not superior sufficient to make the sorts of architectural and systems-level selections human software program engineers routinely make when turning an thought into working software program. The findings may additionally point out that AI brokers nonetheless battle to use summary rules discovered throughout coaching to completely novel issues.
Extra AI protection from Quick Firm:
- How a Texas vegan cheese-maker used Claude and Manus to fight back against a big shipping company
- AI power users are pulling away from everyone else, Microsoft says
- AI labels were supposed to help users spot fakes. Here’s why they’re failing
- OpenAI’s trillion-dollar AI bet is a study in ‘riskmaxxing’
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