Meta’s LLaMA 4 Strengthens U.S. Lead In The Global AI Race

Meta has just unveiled Llama 4, its most advanced artificial intelligence model to date. According to David Sacks, AI advisor at the White House, this technological advancement restores the United States’ advantage in the global competition for AI supremacy.

A strategic turning point in the global AI competition

David Sacks, special advisor for AI and crypto to the Trump administration, praised Meta’s advancements regarding their new AI model. In a message posted yesterday on his X account, he stated that “Meta’s Llama 4 puts the United States back in a dominant position in the race for artificial intelligence”.

“For the United States to win the AI race, we must also excel in open source, and Llama 4 puts us back in the lead”, he asserted, in a context where technological rivalry is intensifying between Washington and Beijing.

This statement comes shortly after his appointment following President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Sacks had already emphasized the importance for the United States to remain vigilant despite its lead in this strategic field.

The launch of Llama 4 is part of a global innovation dynamic where major powers are investing heavily in AI, now seen as a matter of national sovereignty, comparable to energy or military sectors.

Performance that surpasses international competition

Meta asserts that its new Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick models are “the most advanced to date” and “the best in their class for multimodality.” These claims are supported by performance tests that position Meta’s models ahead of their main competitors.

The Llama 4 Scout model, equipped with 17 billion active parameters and utilizing 16 experts, would outperform competitors like Gemma 3, Gemini 2.0 Flash-lite, and Mistral 3.1 “across a wide range of recognized benchmarks“, according to data shared by the company.

Even more impressive, Llama 4 Maverick, also equipped with 17 billion parameters but configured with 128 experts, would match or exceed the performance of GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash models.

Meta highlights that Maverick offers comparable capabilities to DeepSeek v3 for reasoning and coding tasks while utilizing only half the active parameters of its competitor.

A breakthrough within a landscape of massive investments

This breakthrough realizes Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitions, who announced in July 2024 that the Llama models would become “the most advanced in the industry” by 2025. A bet that seems well on its way to being realized, just two years after the launch of the first version of Llama in February 2023.

The strengthened position of the United States in the AI race comes as other major initiatives multiply in the sector, such as the recent record fundraising of 40 billion dollars by OpenAI, bringing its valuation to 300 billion.

In this context of global competition, Europe is also seeking to position itself, notably through strategic investments like the AI campus project funded by the United Arab Emirates in France.