That was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s message to buyers throughout his firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call 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 stated 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 targeted on.”
Zuckerberg famous that “there’s plenty of novel issues they did we’re nonetheless digesting” and that Meta plans to implement DeepSeek’s “developments” into Llama. DeepSeek caused a massive sell-off in AI stocks on account of fears that fashions will now 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 line with the growing consensus that computing sources will transfer from the coaching section of AI growth 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’ll be able to “apply extra compute at inference time in an effort 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 accordance with 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 “sturdy enterprise mannequin” to assist the roughly $60 billion it can spend on AI this yr 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 happy with our main firms, prioritizes American expertise profitable,” and “will defend our values and pursuits overseas,” he stated. Moments earlier than the earnings name began, information broke that Meta is paying Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit he introduced towards the corporate for banning his account after the January sixth rebellion. (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 internet revenue was a staggering $20.8 billion (up 43-percent from a yr earlier than). Through the earnings name, CFO Susan Li stated that Meta hasn’t “seen any noticeable affect” from its content policy changes on advert spending. 3.35 billion individuals used at the very least one in all Meta’s apps each day within the fourth quarter — a 5-percent enhance from the year-ago interval.
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