Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg exuded confidence in his company’s artificial intelligence strategy, saying 2025 will be a “really big year” in which its AI assistant will become the most widely used in the industry.
Meta stock gained 4.7% to $708 in premarket trading.
“In AI, I expect that this is going to be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people,” Zuckerberg said Wednesday on a call with investors following the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report. “And I expect Meta AI to be that leading AI assistant.”
Zuckerberg told investors he believes Meta will eventually spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure, imitating and improving on the best technology presented by competitors to ensure its dominance.
Zuckerberg has been using AI technology to transform how Meta’s business works, from the way advertising is targeted to the order of content that appears in its social networks, squeezing more value out of the social media business and its 3.35 billion daily users. That’s all meant to fund money-losing futuristic initiatives like virtual and augmented reality, as well as an expensive build out of AI infrastructure.
Meta executives told investors Wednesday that this heavy investment is already paying off by making ad targeting more efficient. It also teased the idea of making money off its AI assistant at some point in the future, perhaps through subscriptions or sponsored responses, but reiterated that these options weren’t coming anytime soon.
Earnings Results
Meta gave an outlook for first-quarter sales of $39.5 billion to $41.8 billion. The midpoint missed the $41.7 billion average analyst estimate, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram also reported fourth-quarter sales of $48.4 billion, beating the $47 billion that Wall Street expected on average. Advertising from Meta’s social networks, like Instagram and Facebook, continues to drive the vast majority of sales.
Zuckerberg’s remarks came after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released a model that it says was developed at a fraction of the cost and computing power of existing technology — news that caused US and European tech stocks to lose nearly $1 trillion in value Monday.
DeepSeek has done “a number of novel things,” Zuckerberg said. “They have advances that we will hope to implement in our systems — and that’s a part of the nature of how this works, whether it’s a Chinese competitor or not.”
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