The emergence of DeepSeek appears to have nearly everyone in a panic. But Meta isn’t concerned.
On Wednesday, during his company’s fourth-quarter results call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent that message to investors. Zuckerberg was asked several questions concerning DeepSeek’s remarkable AI models and the implications for Meta’s AI strategy during the Q&A section of the call with Wall Street analysts. DeepSeek’s accomplishments with very little funding, he added, have “only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing to be focused on.”
Zuckerberg stated that Meta intends to include DeepSeek’s “advancements” into Llama and that “there’s a number of novel things they did we’re still digesting.” Fears that DeepSeek models would no longer require as much processing power led to a big sell-off in AI equities. “I continue to think that investing very heavily in CapEx and infra is going to be a strategic advantage over time,” Zuckerberg said in an attempt to allay worries that the billions of dollars he is spending on GPUs will be wasted.
His reasoning is consistent with the expanding body of evidence suggesting that computational resources would shift from the training stage of AI development to assisting models in developing their “reasoning.” Since you can “apply more compute at inference time in order to generate a higher level of intelligence and a higher quality of service,” Zuckerberg himself stated that this “doesn’t mean you need less compute.” According to Zuckerberg, Meta is preparing to release Llama 4 with multimodal and “agentic” features in the upcoming months. This year, he anticipates that one billion people will utilize Meta’s AI assistant.
By pointing out that Meta has a “strong business model” to fund the approximately $60 billion it will spend on AI this year, as opposed to “others who don’t necessarily have business models to support it on a sustainable basis,” he also made a subtle shot at OpenAI, Anthropic, and other unsuccessful startups.
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Additionally, Zuckerberg made sure to give President Donald Trump his due. “We now have a US administration that will defend our values and interests abroad, is proud of our leading companies, and prioritizes American technology winning,” he said. Shortly before the earnings call began, it was announced that Trump was getting $25 million from Meta to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the business for blocking his account following the January 6th uprising. (The great bulk of the funds will go toward funding Trump’s presidential library.)
Meta, meantime, is a cash-printing device. In the fourth quarter of 2024, revenue was $48.39 billion, up 22% from the same period the previous year, while net profit was an incredible $20.8 billion, up 43% from the previous year. CFO Susan Li stated on the earnings call that Meta has not “seen any noticeable impact” on ad expenditure as a result of its changes to its content policy. In the fourth quarter, 3.35 billion individuals used at least one of Meta’s apps every day, which is a 5% rise over the same period last year.