That was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s message to traders throughout his firm’s fourth-quarter earnings name on Wednesday. Through the Q&A portion of the decision with Wall Road analysts, Zuckerberg fielded a number of questions on DeepSeek’s spectacular AI fashions and what the implications are for Meta’s AI technique. He mentioned that what DeepSeek was capable of accomplish with comparatively little cash has “solely strengthened our conviction that that is the suitable factor to be centered on.”
Zuckerberg famous that “there’s quite a lot of novel issues they did we’re nonetheless digesting” and that Meta plans to implement DeepSeek’s “developments” into Llama. DeepSeek brought on an enormous sell-off in AI shares because of fears that fashions will not want as a lot computing energy. Zuckerberg tried to dispel considerations that the billions of {dollars} he’s spending on GPUs will go to waste: “I proceed to suppose that investing very closely in CapEx and infra goes to be a strategic benefit over time.”
His argument is in keeping with the rising consensus that computing sources will transfer from the coaching section of AI improvement in direction of serving to fashions higher “motive.” In Zuckerberg’s personal phrases, this “doesn’t imply you want much less compute” as a result of you may “apply extra compute at inference time with the intention to generate a better stage of intelligence and a better high quality of service.” Meta is gearing as much as launch Llama 4 with multimodal and “agentic” capabilities within the coming months, in response to Zuckerberg. He expects Meta’s AI assistant to succeed in one billion customers this 12 months.
He additionally took a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI, Anthropic, and different unprofitable startups by noting that Meta has a “sturdy enterprise mannequin” to assist the roughly $60 billion it’ll spend on AI this 12 months versus “others who don’t essentially have enterprise fashions to assist it on a sustainable foundation.”
Zuckerberg additionally made certain to reward President Donald Trump. “We now have a US administration that’s pleased with our main firms, prioritizes American know-how successful,” and “will defend our values and pursuits overseas,” he mentioned. Moments earlier than the earnings name began, information broke that Meta is paying Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit he introduced in opposition to the corporate for banning his account after the January sixth riot. (The overwhelming majority of the cash goes to pay for Trump’s presidential library.)
In the meantime, Meta is a cash-printing machine. Income for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $48.39 billion — a 22-percent enhance from the year-ago interval — whereas web revenue was a staggering $20.8 billion (up 43-percent from a 12 months earlier than). Through the earnings name, CFO Susan Li mentioned that Meta hasn’t “seen any noticeable impression” from its content material coverage modifications on advert spending. 3.35 billion folks used a minimum of one in every of Meta’s apps each day within the fourth quarter — a 5-percent enhance from the year-ago interval.
