Meta (META+2.09%) CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees during a company-wide Q&A session on Thursday that “its going to be a crazy year.”
The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg spoke to over 70,000 employees during an hour-long meeting, outlining Meta’s strategic priorities for 2025 — including artificial intelligence, data center investments, and the metaverse.
The meeting took place just a day after Meta reported strong fourth-quarter earnings, with revenue climbing 21% year over year to $48.4 billion.
Zuckerberg also spent time defending some of the company’s recent changes, including scaling back restrictions on online speech, ending diversity initiatives, rolling back Meta’s fact-checking program, and aligning more closely with President Donald Trump’s administration.
“I want to be clear, after the last several years, we now have an opportunity to have a productive partnership with the United States government,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that Meta wouldn’t be the only company to make such changes to more closely align with the new presidential administration.
“We’re in the middle of a pretty rapidly changing policy and regulatory landscape that views any policy that might advantage any one group of people over another as something that is unlawful,” Zuckerburg said. “Because of that, we and every other institution out there are going to need to adjust.”
The meeting also comes just weeks after news broke that the company plans to layoff about 3,600 low-performing workers next month. In a memo to staff posted on Meta’s internal forum, Workplace, Zuckerberg said he’s decided to “raise the bar” on performance management. The memo also mentioned that this would be an “intense year” for the company.
“Meta is working on building some of the most important technologies in the world — AI, glasses as the next computing platform, and the future of social media,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “This is going to be an intense year, and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams.”
However, some employees pressed Zuckerberg during Thursday’s meeting on Meta’s rising investments in data centers, given the emergence of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup that developed an advanced AI model at a fraction of competitors’ costs.
Zuckerberg responded that DeepSeek’s technological advancements have already helped improve Meta’s AI models and support the company’s open-source AI strategy. He also said that spending on data centers will prove to be a competitive advantage for the company.
– William Gavin contributed to this report.
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