IT之家 News on October 14: according to a Bloomberg report early this morning (the 14th), Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that last year the company, still not knowing whether its AI products would succeed, had no choice but to commit to investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure needed to run those products.
On the latest episode of the Cheeky Pint podcast, Zuckerberg recalled telling Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang: "We're going to have to shell out a chunk of money—I can't say whether it's $100 billion (IT Home note: approximately 670.582 billion RMB at the current exchange rate) or $200 billion (approximately 1.34 trillion RMB at the current exchange rate). Are you sure this will succeed?"
These remarks by Zuckerberg also reveal the uncertainty the company faced at the time. Meta has struggled to convince investors to accept the surge in spending brought on by AI investment. Although he repeatedly stressed that the massive investments would eventually pay off, shareholders grew increasingly worried about Meta's revenue and profits.Can it grow fast enough?。
During the more than two-hour interview, Zuckerberg and Frank Wang revealed that Meta CFO Susan Li had repeatedly warned them that once an investment failed,The cost would be extremely high. Zuckerberg said to Wang Tao: "I think Susan kind of scared you."
Wang Ying recalled: "Every time we talk about this, we joke: 'Well, hopefully everything goes smoothly and it works out in the end.'"
Faced with such a huge investment, he could only talk about the team's research progress based on intuition at best, and could not guarantee the project would definitely succeed,At the time, there was no certainty of success at all。
Zuckerberg admitted that he had no idea how consumers would react to Muse: "We originally thought the more likely scenario was: 'Okay, the product will probably need quite a bit of improvement after launch.'"
To compete with US tech companies such as Google's parent company Alphabet, OpenAI, and Anthropic in the race to develop advanced AI models and products, Meta has invested hundreds of billions of dollars. In AI data center construction, Meta's spending also ranks among the highest in the tech industry.
Investors will get another look at Meta's finances next week. The company is scheduled to report its results after the market close on October 21. Last quarter, as spending on data centers and smart glasses continued to rise, Meta's free cash flow fell to its lowest level in years, and the stock price dropped 8% as a result.
As of the market close on Monday local time, Meta's stock price has risen more than 12% so far this year.
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