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Amid the DeepSeek tremor in Silicon Valley, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has warned employees to brace for an “intense year”.
“It’s going to be an intense year, so buckle up. We’ve got a lot to do. I’m excited about it,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying by The Verge. The tech billionaire made the remarks at his first all-hands meeting of the year on Thursday, January 30.
Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced sweeping changes to Meta’s content moderation policies and scraped the company’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programmes, coinciding with US President Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The Facebook co-founder also sparked controversy with his comment on a podcast about wanting more “masculine energy” in the workplace.
“I think the direction of the policy and regulatory and legal direction on a lot of this stuff is that you can’t do things that advantage specific groups, even if you’re trying to make up for other things,” Zuckerberg said at Thursday’s internal meeting.
“When we say that someone can say something on our services, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree with that thing. It just means that we want to be a platform where people can discuss things,” he said while talking about Meta’s modified content moderation rules that reportedly lets users call trans people “mentally ill” without facing action on the platform.
Zuckerberg had also announced that low-performing employees would be let go on February 10. In response to concerns about the imminent layoffs, he said, “The right thing to do is just rip the band-aid off [..] I think, in a lot of ways, it is a nicer thing to do for people who are probably not going to end up making it anyway.”
Meta sold over one million units of its smart glasses made in partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban last year, Zuckerberg revealed for the first time.
“A lot of the big hit products in their third generation reached 5 to 10 million units. […] So I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? Are we going to go from 1 million to 5 million?” he said.
Meta is also developing a more expensive model of smart glasses with a heads-up display internally called Hypernova, The Verge reported. “We just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity,” Zuckerberg was quoted as saying.
Zuckerberg disclosed that Meta AI currently has around 700 million monthly users. The company hopes to ramp up the figure to one billion users by the end of this year.
“We know from building a lot of stuff over the last 20 years that services can kind of come and go, but once something reaches that scale and has a data flywheel, it generally can develop a pretty durable advantage … We have a bunch of work to make it more engaging this year. We’re going to focus a lot on personalization as one of the key themes around this,” Zuckerberg reportedly said.
The CEO also expressed a hint of regret over DeepSeek’s breakthrough. “Whenever I see someone else do something, I’m like, ‘Ah come on! We should have been there, right? We [have] got to make sure we’re on it,” he said.
On the possibility of a ban against rival platform TikTok, he commented: “I’m pretty sure whatever happens, I’m very confident that Facebook and Instagram Reels are going to continue growing… Who’s going to own TikTok at the end of the year? What’s going to happen? That’s a big deal.”
