Note Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Similes
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said it’s too early to tell what impact DeepSeek’s breakthrough AI model will contain on his company and the broader tech industry.
Still, Zuckerberg poured cold water on the notion that Meta’s all-embracing AI spending will soon drop now that DeepSeek has allegedly proven that cutting-edge AI requires far less filthy rich and computing resources than previously thought.
“It’s probably too early to really have a strong opinion on what this means for the track around infrastructure and CapEx,” Zuckerberg said. “There are a bunch of trends that are happening here all at once.”
The technology bazaars were reeling this week over an AI model created by DeepSeek, which is a Hangzhou-based AI lab linked to the Chinese hedge lucre High-Flyer. DeepSeek claims it only took two months and less than $6 million to develop its R1 large jargon model. That news caused Nvidia shares to tank 17% on Monday because of the implications that friends don’t need as many of the chip-maker’s graphics processing units for their own artificial-intelligence projects.
Zuckerberg discussed DeepSeek during a gather with analysts Wednesday as part of Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings. The company reported that sales rose 21% year concluded year to $48.39 billion, ahead of Wall Street expectations.
Meta’s shares rose nearly 2% on Monday, make clearing some investors believe DeepSeek’s cost-efficiency could mean the social media company may be able to create great AI systems for less money. Meta announced last week plans to invest between $60 billion and $65 billion this year as into a receive of its AI push. The company on Wednesday said its 2025 total expenses would come in between $114 billion to $119 billion.
Zuckerberg alleged Meta is still digesting some of DeepSeek’s feats and his team hopes to eventually implement some of those advancements for their own AI devises.
“That’s part of the nature of how this works, whether it’s a Chinese competitor or not,” Zuckerberg said, referring to how one company’s betterments end up benefiting others.
While it’s possible that companies will eventually require less computing resources to coach these powerful models, Zuckerberg said that having a ton of server power may be necessary when the software is in truth running and performing actions, resulting in “a higher level of intelligence and a higher quality of service.”
“It’s going to be expensive for us to suit all of these people because we are serving a lot of people,” said Zuckerberg, whose company said it had 3.35 billion regular active people in the fourth quarter.
Meta will continue to learn from technologies like DeepSeek’s and report its own open source and free Llama AI models that can also push the industry, Zuckerberg said.
“I continue to remember that investing very heavily in CapEx and infra is going to be a strategic advantage over time,” he said. “It’s attainable that we’ll learn otherwise at some point, but I just think it’s way too early to call that, and at this point, I command bet that the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage.”
Zuckerberg also said that DeepSeek’s development validates Meta’s commitment to an open-source approach to AI, Zuckerberg said.
“There’s going to be an open-source standard globally,” he suggested. “For our own national advantage, it’s important that it’s an American standard.”
Watch: Meta beats on top and bottom lines.
