Zuckerberg: Too Soon to Say How DeepSeek Will Impact Meta AI
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, says it's too soon to tell what kind of impact DeepSeek will have on the company's AI spending. During Meta's earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was asked by an analyst how DeepSeek — the Chinese AI startup that sent Silicon Valley into a tailspin by building powerful models at a reported fraction of the cost — will impact Meta's own investments in AI.
"They have advances that we will hope to implement in our systems, and that's part of the nature of how this works, whether it's a Chinese competitor or not," Zuckerberg said, adding DeepSeek had done "a number of novel things" that Meta is "still digesting."
But he said that probably won't change how Meta is investing in AI, at least for now. "It's probably too early to really have a strong opinion on what this means for the trajectory around infrastructure and capex and things like that," Zuckerberg said.
Impact on US Tech Companies
Meta and other US tech companies have recently faced questions on when their heavy investments on AI would start paying off. That scrutiny hit new levels this month when DeepSeek said it trained its AI models for a fraction of the cost that its US rivals spent, causing some tech stocks to tumble.
Last week, Zuckerberg said Meta planned to spend between $60 billion to $65 billion in capital investments in 2025. During the earnings call on Wednesday, he defended those investments, saying that while the use of Meta's AI computing infrastructure could change, the need for it will not disappear.
Commitment to Open-Source AI
On the earnings call, Zuckerberg also reaffirmed his commitment to open-source AI with a notable caveat: It should follow American standards. "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," Zuckerberg said.
Earlier in the call, he highlighted a shift in the relationship between Big Tech and Washington, pointing to a more supportive US administration that backs American companies in the global AI race.
Yann LeCun's Perspective
Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, previously said that the lesson to take away from DeepSeek's success wasn't that China's AI is "surpassing the US," but rather that "open source models are surpassing proprietary ones."
