BBC News
Meta has defended its $65bn (£52bn) investment in artificial intelligence (AI) days after US tech stocks wobbled in the wake of Chinese AI app DeepSeek’s sudden rise.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said to investors on Wednesday there was a lot to learn from DeepSeek, but that it was too soon to have “a really strong opinion” about what the app means for the future of AI.
“If anything, I think the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is right thing for us to be focused on,” he added.
Many US tech stocks sank this week after DeepSeek surged in popularity, though Meta’s has bucked this trend by rising.
The stock was up in after hours trading after it posted better than expected financial results on Wednesday.
However, questions remain about what advances in Chinese AI will mean for the US AI market generally considering DeepSeek’s claim it was developed at a fraction of the cost of its US rivals.
Zuckerberg said in a call to investors following the results on Wednesday that DeepSeek’s rise strengthened his conviction in his company’s embrace of “open-source” AI.
Meta, parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, took a different tack from many US companies by releasing an open source AI model for free.
Zuckerberg on Wednesday said he thought that approach was important to keeping the US at the cutting edge, as countries around the world compete to become the key players in the still-emerging industry.
“There’s going to be an open source standard globally and I think for our own national advantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” he said.
“We take that seriously. We want to build the AI system that people around the world are using.”
‘Major advantage’
Meta last week announced it was planning to spend as much as $65bn this year to expand its AI infrastructure.
Zuckerberg on Wednesday acknowledged ongoing debate about how best to direct AI investments, but told investors that for his firm, which serves billions of people globally, big investments made sense.
“I would bet the ability to build out that kind of infrastructure is going to be a major advantage – for both the quality of the service and being able to serve the scale we want to,” he said.
He said it would also be a critical year for the company in other areas, saying he this year would be key to determining whether sales of the company’s smart glasses will take off as hoped.
Zuckerberg has said he expects all glasses to be replaced by smart glasses within a decade, a prediction he repeated on Wednesday.
He also spoke of plans to revive the “cultural relevance” of Facebook, the social media sight that launched his fortune but which has fallen out of favour compared to other offerings such as Instagram and tikTok.
Zuckerberg also defended his recently announced decision to end fact-checking, saying he thought plans for community notes would be more effective.
He said the company had seen no hit to advertiser demand as a result of its changes.
It reported more than $48bn in revenue in the last three months of 2024, up 21% from the same period the prior year.
Though AI spending has weighed on the company, it still reported quarterly profit of more than $20bn, up 49% from a year ago.