Forget DeepSeek. Zuckerberg Says Meta Will Spend Hundreds Of Billions On AI.
Meta’s CEO says its consumer AI offering ‘is going to be one of the most transformative products that we’ve made’
For those who were thinking Meta Platforms Inc. might back down from its heavy-spending ways in the wake of the DeepSeek news, think again. Not only did Meta stand by its forecast for $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures this year, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg first shared on Facebook last week, but management also vowed to keep spending big on artificial intelligence in the years to come.
On the earnings call, Zuckerberg spoke of “the hundreds of billions of dollars” Meta will invest in AI infrastructure over the long term. Meta shares rose 2.3% in the extended session, following a mixed combined slate of results and guidance.
Zuckerberg added that he often says each year will be a big one, but “more than usual, it feels like the trajectory for most of our long-term initiatives is going to be a lot clearer by the end of this year.” He sees the big AI spending as a support for the company’s goal of getting Meta AI, a consumer AI offering, into the hands of over a billion users by the end of 2025. “I continue to think that this is going to be one of the most transformative products that we’ve made,” he said.
Tech giants have been trying to find a way to put a computer on your head — and then have people buy that computer — for years. Now, Mark Zuckerberg says, we're going to find out if people are really going to buy these things in meaningful numbers — or if the industry is going to have to wait even longer for the future to arrive.
"This will be a defining year that determines if we're on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform, like we've been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind," the Meta CEO said during his company's earnings call Wednesday.
Zuckerberg has seen some promising signs that he might have figured it out. Sales of Meta's Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, while modest compared to mainstream tech products, have been a pleasant surprise for the company — Zuckerberg called them a "real hit" on the company's call.
More about Meta’s earnings call and AI efforts
Reid Hoffman: Why The AI Investment Will Pay Off | Big Technology Podcast
Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a legendary Silicon Valley investor, and author of the new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future. Hoffman joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss his optimistic case for AI, the massive investments flooding into the field, and whether they can possibly pay off.
Tune in to hear Hoffman's insider perspective on OpenAI's $6.6 billion raise, the emergence of Chinese AI competitor DeepSeek, and why he believes these unprecedented investments will seem small in retrospect.
We also cover the evolving Microsoft-OpenAI relationship, tech CEOs gravitating toward Trump, and Hoffman's views on AI regulation and TikTok's future. Hit play for a deep dive into AI's trajectory from one of the industry's most influential voices.
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Meet Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 Max, An AI Model Claiming To Beat Both DeepSeek’s V3, Llama 3.1, And OpenAI's ChatGPT 4o
The announcement follows a market frenzy triggered by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek
Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, released a new version of its AI model and made big claims — notably that it outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT and the newly ascending DeepSeek. "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B," Alibaba's cloud unit wrote in a statement, according to Reuters. Those are OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Meta's latest AI offerings, respectively.
There are precious few other details about the release from Alibaba. It does come at a time, however, where the AI world is scrambling amid the Chinese-owned DeepSeek rocketing in popularity. Its model is purportedly as good, or better, than its competitors despite being cheaper and requiring fewer chips.
Despite privacy concerns, DeepSeek quickly shot to the top of Apple's app store. Amid the burgeoning popularity, OpenAI — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — dropped its latest release, a government focused GPT tool. This announcement came as tech stocks took a major hit due to DeepSeek. It would stand to reason Alibaba could feel the heat as well.
Wrote Reuters: "The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition."
More on Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5-Max Large Language Model on Mashable
DeepSeek Vs. Open AI | The State Of AI With Emad Mostaque And Salim Ismail
In this episode, Emad Mostaque, Salim Ismail, and Peter Diamandis discuss recent DeepSeek news, the China vs. USA AI race, and what Emad has been working on.
Emad is the founder of Intelligent Internet and the former CEO and Co-Founder of Stability AI, a company funding the development of open-source music- and image-generating systems such as Dance Diffusion, Stable Diffusion, and Stable Video 3D.
Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.
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Dario Amodei Challenges DeepSeek’s $6 Million AI Narrative: What Anthropic CEO Thinks About China’s Latest AI Moves
The AI world was rocked last week when DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, announced its latest language model DeepSeek-R1 that appeared to match the capabilities of leading American AI systems at a fraction of the cost. The announcement triggered a widespread market selloff that wiped nearly $200 billion from Nvidia’s market value and sparked heated debates about the future of AI development.
The narrative that quickly emerged suggested that DeepSeek had fundamentally disrupted the economics of building advanced AI systems, supposedly achieving with just $6 million what American companies had spent billions to accomplish. This interpretation sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, where companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have justified massive investments in computing infrastructure to maintain their technological edge.
But amid the market turbulence and breathless headlines, Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic and one of the pioneering researchers behind today’s large language models (LLMs), published a detailed analysis that offers a more nuanced perspective on DeepSeek’s achievements. His blog post cuts through the hysteria to deliver several crucial insights about what DeepSeek actually accomplished and what it means for the future of AI development. Here are the four key insights from Amodei’s analysis that reshape our understanding of DeepSeek’s announcement.
1. The ‘$6 million model’ narrative misses crucial context
DeepSeek’s reported development costs need to be viewed through a wider lens, according to Amodei. He directly challenges the popular interpretation:
“DeepSeek does not ‘do for $6 million what cost U.S. AI companies billions.’ I can only speak for Anthropic, but Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a mid-sized model that cost a few $10s of millions to train (I won’t give an exact number). Also, 3.5 Sonnet was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model (contrary to some rumors).”
This shocking revelation fundamentally shifts the narrative around DeepSeek’s cost efficiency. When considering that Sonnet was trained 9-12 months ago and still outperforms DeepSeek’s model on many tasks, the achievement appears more in line with the natural progression of AI development costs rather than a revolutionary breakthrough.
The timing and context also matter significantly. Following historical trends of cost reduction in AI development — which Amodei estimates at roughly 4X per year — DeepSeek’s cost structure appears to be largely on trend rather than dramatically ahead of the curve.
More on Dario Amodei’s perspective of DeepSeek’s narrative
Diffusion Models for AI Image Generation
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Microsoft Makes DeepSeek’s R1 Model Available On Azure AI, And GitHub
Microsoft has moved surprisingly quickly to bring R1 to its Azure customers.
Microsoft is bringing Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s R1 model to its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub today. The R1 model, which has rocked US financial markets this week because it can be trained at a fraction of the cost of leading models from OpenAI, is now part of a model catalog on Azure AI Foundry and GitHub — allowing Microsoft’s customers to integrate it into their AI applications.
“One of the key advantages of using DeepSeek R1 or any other model on Azure AI Foundry is the speed at which developers can experiment, iterate, and integrate AI into their workflows,” says Asha Sharma, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI platform. “DeepSeek R1 has undergone rigorous red teaming and safety evaluations, including automated assessments of model behavior and extensive security reviews to mitigate potential risks.”
R1 was initially released as an open source model earlier this month, and Microsoft has moved at surprising pace to integrate this into Azure AI Foundry. The software maker will also make a distilled, smaller version of R1 available to run locally on Copilot Plus PCs soon, and it’s possible we may even see R1 show up in other AI-powered services from Microsoft.
More on Microsoft making DeepSeek’s R1 available on The Verge
What's Next In AI For DeepSeek, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Meta, And Microsoft?
DeepSeek is strategically launching free AI products to disrupt OpenAI’s dominance, including an Operator clone, voice AI, and a likely Sora competitor. This aggressive move threatens OpenAI’s paid model and forces competitors to rethink pricing.
Meanwhile, Meta has committed over $60 billion to AI, with Zuckerberg laser-focused on AGI. Game theory dictates that AI companies must keep spending—if they don’t, a competitor will, and they risk losing everything. China is also heavily investing, ensuring global AI competition remains fierce. Nvidia remains the biggest winner, as all players must buy chips to stay competitive in the race.
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