One positive theme that emerged from Meta’s quarterly earning call this week is that CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems largely unfazed by the threat of new Artificial Intelligence competitor, DeepSeek. Instead, the guy is aggressively focused on growth and opportunities ahead. Here are five (5) Mark Zuckerberg quotes from the call that stood out as impressive and encouraging for Meta’s continued high-growth trajectory.
1. AI as good as mid-level engineers:
To help quantify the power of new AI technologies, and the efficiencies it can create:
“I also expect that 2025 will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that has coding and problem-solving abilities of around a good mid-level engineer.”
2. Massive Data Center Growth
Massive data centers are needed to power AI, and here is how scary massive, according to Zuckerberg:
“we're building a 2 gigawatt and potentially bigger AI datacenter, so big that it would cover a significant part of Manhattan if it were placed there.”
3. Shifted Political Views
Whether Zuckerberg believes any of this, or he is just pandering to the current administration, this seems like a big positive for Meta:
“We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I'm optimistic about the progress and innovation this is going to unlock.”
4. AI will become less expensive
DeepSeek is the startup AI technology from China that is supposedly better than US AI technologies and requires dramatically less computational power (i.e. less GPU chips and less data center capacity). Zuckerberg seems to suggest the code will become open source (publicly available for free).
I also just think in light of some of the recent news, the new competitor DeepSeek from China, I think it also just puts -- it's one of the things that we're talking about is there's going to be an open source standard globally.
And if it does become open source, then the real advantage will be data. Specifically, who has private proprietary data to train AI models. And one answer is Meta—they have more propriety social media data than anyone (to train AI models). This is a huge advantage for Meta.
5. AI Will Continue to Improve.
Zuckerberg basically says they’re going to copy what DeepSeek is doing.
I can start on the DeepSeek question. I think there's a number of novel things that they did that I think we're still digesting. And there are a number of things that they have advanced 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. I kind of expect that every new company that has an advance -- that has a launch is going to have some new advances that the rest of the field learns from. And that's sort of how the technology industry goes.
Bottom Line
Zuckerberg is very excited about growth at Meta, and seems totally unfazed by DeepSeek (i.e. he didn’t sound threatened at all).
Meta has more free cash flow than just about anyone, and it is very encouraging for shareholders that the CEO continues to see massive growth opportunities to spend it on. The alternative would be, if there was no growth, to pay more dividends and do more share repurchases, which is a fine strategy, but it’s just not the type of growth strategy that can result in massive long-term stock price gains—which is why people currently invest in Meta.
*note: long Meta.