That was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s message to traders throughout his firm’s fourth-quarter earnings name on Wednesday. During the Q&A portion of the decision with Wall Street 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 in a position to accomplish with comparatively little cash has “solely strengthened our conviction that that is the precise factor to be centered on.”
Zuckerberg famous that “there’s quite a few novel issues they did we’re nonetheless digesting” and that Meta plans to implement DeepSeek’s “developments” into Llama. DeepSeek induced a large sell-off in AI shares as a consequence of fears that fashions will not want as a lot computing energy. Zuckerberg tried to dispel issues that the billions of {dollars} he’s spending on GPUs will go to waste: “I proceed to assume that investing very closely in CapEx and infra goes to be a strategic benefit over time.”
His argument is in step with the rising consensus that computing assets will transfer from the coaching section of AI growth in the direction of serving to fashions higher “cause.” 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 so as to generate the next stage of intelligence and the next 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 achieve one billion customers this yr.
He additionally took a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI, Anthropic, and different unprofitable startups by noting that Meta has a “robust enterprise mannequin” to help the roughly $60 billion it’ll spend on AI this yr versus “others who don’t essentially have enterprise fashions to help it on a sustainable foundation.”
Zuckerberg additionally made positive to reward President Donald Trump. “We now have a US administration that’s happy with our main corporations, prioritizes American know-how profitable,” 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.)
Meanwhile, Meta is a cash-printing machine. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $48.39 billion — a 22-percent enhance from the year-ago interval — whereas internet revenue was a staggering $20.8 billion (up 43-percent from a yr earlier than). During 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 at the very least certainly one of Meta’s apps each day within the fourth quarter — a 5-percent enhance from the year-ago interval.
