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Today’s Menu

• Meta answers DeepSeek with powerful open-weight AI models

• Key events this week set to impact crypto markets

Markets

TODAY IN AI

Meta answers DeepSeek with powerful open-weight AI models

Meta has officially announced its Llama 4 family, delivering multimodal capabilities and industry-leading context lengths across a range of new models. The release introduces the open-weights Scout and Maverick systems while previewing a massive 2 trillion parameter Behemoth model still in training.

The 109B parameter Scout model brings a 10 million token context window and can run on a single H100 GPU - outperforming both Gemma 3 and Mistral 3 on benchmarks. For perspective, this context length is 5-10x what most commercial models currently offer, enabling dramatically more complex reasoning across longer documents.

The 400B Maverick raises the stakes even higher, edging out both GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash on key benchmarks while delivering superior cost efficiency. Meanwhile, the still-training Behemoth's 2 trillion parameters reportedly surpass GPT-4.5, Claude 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro.

All three models leverage mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, where specialized neural network "experts" activate only for relevant tokens - significantly reducing computation requirements and inference costs compared to dense models of similar capability.

The release timing is critical. DeepSeek's R1 model disrupted the open-source AI market earlier this year, threatening Meta's position in the open-weights space. Llama 4 responds with efficiency improvements, massive context handling, and multimodal abilities - though questions remain about whether the models genuinely feel next-level in practice despite their benchmark dominance.

What this means for the AI landscape: Meta's aggressive release schedule of increasingly powerful open-weight models continues to pressure commercial AI providers while democratizing access to cutting-edge capabilities. The ability to run powerful models locally will accelerate enterprise adoption and enable a new wave of specialized applications.

^{Today In Crypto}

Key events this week set to impact crypto markets

On the regulatory front, April 9th will see the U.S. House Financial Services Committee hold a hearing on updating securities laws for digital assets. This comes at a pivotal moment as the SEC's approach to crypto regulation appears to be softening. The agency's Crypto Task Force will follow with an April 11th roundtable focusing specifically on "Tailoring Regulation for Crypto Trading" - potentially signaling a more nuanced regulatory framework ahead.

The legal drama continues with former Terraform Labs CEO Do Hyeong Kwon scheduled for a status conference at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on April 10th. The outcome could influence market sentiment around algorithmic stablecoins and project governance.

Technical developments include Syscoin activating its Nexus upgrade on April 7th and Neutron migrating from Cosmos Hub's Interchain Security to become a fully sovereign Proof-of-Stake network on April 9th.

On the macro front, April 9th marks the implementation of the Trump administration's new individualized tariffs on imports from countries with large trade deficits with the U.S. China's 34% retaliatory tariffs on U.S. imports take effect the same day. The resulting market volatility could drive investors toward crypto as a hedge.

Looking ahead to April 14th, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele - known for making Bitcoin legal tender in his country - will join U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House. The meeting could signal shifting U.S. attitudes toward sovereign Bitcoin adoption.

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Thanks for reading!

Until next time,

Damon James