“This is going to be a big year,” said Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Speaking on a post-earnings call with analysts of myriad technological advances in the works, he also confirmed what’s been evident, that Meta will be “redefining our relationship with governments” under the administration of Donald Trump.
“We now have a U.S. administration that is proud of our leading companies. That prioritizes American technology winning. And that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock,” he said. “I think that this is the most exciting and dynamic that I have ever seen our industry.”
Meta tonight settled a lawsuit with President Trump for $25 million. The suit stemmed from 2020, when Trump was temporarily thrown off Facebook (and other social media) after the Jan. 6 insurrection when a group of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. In recently weeks, Zuckerberg has visited Trump and was at his inauguration seated in a row with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai.
That followed Meta’s Jan. 7 annoucement that it was dropped its third-party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model like the one employed by Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter. Zuckerberg said then that Meta “will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.”
It will also” take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can.”
Asked on the call about this – well, specifically about how it would play with advertisers, many of whom left X – he said, “I mean, look, I think we’re trying to build the service that we think is the best for people. I’ve believed in free expression for quite a while. People don’t want to see misinformation. But you need to build an effective system that gives people more context. And I think what we found over time is that Community Notes system, I think, is just going to be more effective than the system that we had before. And I’m not afraid to admit when someone does something that’s better than us. I think it’s sort of our job to go and just do the best work and implement the best system.
“So, I think that there’s been a lot of people who read this announcement as if we somehow don’t care about adding context to things that are on our platform, that are misinformation. That’s not right. I actually think that the Community Notes system like what X has had for a while is actually just more effective than what we were doing before, and I think our product is going to get better.”
Meta CFO Susan Li added that Meta hasn’t seen any “noticeable impact from our content policy changes on advertiser spend. We’re continuing to see strong advertiser demand, particularly for AI powered tools that are helping businesses maximize the value of their ad spend. So our commitment to brand safety is unchanged. And we expect that we will invest in our suite of tools to meet the needs of advertisers.”
AI took up much of the hour. One tidbit: Zuckerberg said that 2025 “will be the year when it becomes possible to build an AI engineering agent that has the coding and problem-solving abilities of … a good, mid-level engineer. And this is going to be a profound milestone and potentially one of the most important innovations in history.”
He’s not sure who will build it first but whoever does “is going to have a meaningful advantage in deploying it to advance their AI research and shape the field. So that’s another reason why I think that this year is going to set the course for the future.”
“I keep telling our teams that this is going to be intense, because we have about 48 weeks to get on the trajectory that we want to be on in AI.”
He said he expects Meta’s AI Assistant to reach more than 1 billion people. “It’s already used by more people than any other assistant, and once a service reaches that kind of scale, it usually develops a durable, long-term advantage.”
“We have a really exciting roadmap for this year with a unique vision focused on personalization. We believe that people don’t all want to use the same AI. People want their AI to be personalized to their context, their interests, their personality, their culture and how they think about the world. I don’t think that there’s just going to be one big AI that everyone uses that does the same thing. People are going to get to choose how their AI works and what it looks like for them.”
One potential problem. A Chinese company DeepSeek just rolled out a good large language model and chatbot rivaling leader ChatGPT at a much lower cost than U.S. rivals. That has some investors worried given the many billions of dollars companies Stateside are laying out.
“There’s a number of novel things that 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. You know, I kind of expect that every new company … 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. 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.”
“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. So we take that seriously and we want to build the AI system that people around the world are using. And I think that, if anything, some of the recent news has only strengthened our conviction that this is the right thing for us to be focused on.”
Another key 2025 milestone – “We’re going to learn what’s going to happen with TikTok.” A vanished or hobbled TikTok would be great news for Meta, but he didn’t dwell. “Regardless,” he said, he expects Meta’s TikTok rivals “Reels on Instagram and Facebook to continue growing. I expect Threads to continue on its trajectory to become a leading discussion platform and eventually reach a billion people over the next several years … I expect WhatsApp to continue getting shared and making progress towards becoming the leading messaging platform in the U.S. like it is in a lot of the rest of the world.”
