Mark Zuckerberg: DeepSeek shows why U.S. must be AI’s ‘global open source standard’; no reason to rethink spending

Meta re-affirmed its program Wednesday to walk betwixt $60 cardinal and $65 cardinal successful superior expenditures this year, up from $39 cardinal successful 2024, arsenic the institution races to physique the costly information centers indispensable to powerfulness caller types of AI services, including a “highly intelligent and personalized assistant.” Over the agelong term, Zuckerberg said, Meta volition walk “hundreds of billions of dollars” connected AI infrastructure.

The advent of generative AI, specified arsenic OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has spurred an arms contention among tech companies similar Meta, Microsoft, and Alphabet, which each judge that owning the computing resources to tally the astir precocious AI models is captious to their aboriginal concern prospects. Earlier this month, OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank announced plans to put $500 cardinal implicit 4 years into the alleged Stargate AI information centers.

That conception was precocious called into question erstwhile DeepSeek, a Chinese startup, released caller AI models that rivaled the astir precocious AI offerings developed by U.S. companies. But, according to DeepSeek, they were trained astatine a fraction of the cost. While immoderate manufacture observers are skeptical astir DeepSeek’s claims regarding costs, the capabilities of its AI models person nevertheless earned praise.

Zuckerberg said determination were a fig of caller things DeepSeek did “that we’re inactive digesting” and that helium hoped to instrumentality immoderate of those advances into Meta’s ain AI technology. And helium noted that the information that DeepSeek’s exemplary was unfastened root was impervious that Meta’s determination to marque its Llama AI exertion unfastened root was the close move.

“There’s going to beryllium an unfastened root modular globally, and I deliberation that for our ain nationalist vantage it’s important that it’s an American standard,” Zuckerberg said. “The caller quality has lone strengthened our condemnation that this is the close happening to beryllium focused on.”

While Zuckerberg did enactment that changes successful the mode precocious AI models are trained and tally mightiness astatine immoderate constituent alteration the calculus for infrastructure investment, helium said that it was inactive “too aboriginal to truly person a beardown opinion” connected it based simply connected DeepSeek.

Meta’s wide fiscal results for the past 3 months of 2024 bushed analysts expectations, with gross of $48.4 billion, up 21% year-over-year and up of the $46.99 expected by Wall Street. The institution station nett income of $20.8 billion, oregon $8.02 per stock versus the $6.76 EPS expected by analysts.