Why Is Meta Spending $100 Billion Before the Model Exists?

Alexandr Wang says frontier AI is the opposite of a lean startup. A lean startup gets something working and only then doubles down. You cannot do that here. The bets have to be made before there is proof the thing works, or you end up radically behind. He calls it entrepreneurship on hard mode, and he gives Mark Zuckerberg credit for taking those decisions.

Zuckerberg retells the end of last year. They were excited about the progress and had not seen the models yet. The check they were going to write was, as he put it, like $100 billion or $200 billion, and he asked Alex if he was sure it was going to work. John Collison describes the same constraint as pushing the chips all in before the cards are dealt, because at this scale the clusters have to be this big.

At an executive offsite in Hawaii at the end of last year, Susan pulled Wang aside more than once. She told him that if it did not work it would be really bad in financial terms, and that the model had to be good. If it was good, they would be fine. If it was bad, it would be very bad.