Meta Finishes 2024 with Strong Numbers

Meta Platforms reported a strong fourth quarter of 2024, booking a double-digit growth in revenues and profits. Net income grew 49% year-on-year to $20.8 billion, with revenue up 21% to $43.3 billion.

Meta CFO Susan Li predicted revenue in the current quarter would be in the range of $39.5 billion to $41.8 billion. The company’s Reality Labs division posted an operating loss of $4.9 billion on revenue of $1 billion, which is flat. Meta previously revealed it anticipates capex of between $60 billion and $65 billion in 2025, driven by investments in AI and its core business.

During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted the company’s AI assistant would become the most widely used in 2025. He expects that this year the technology will begin to soar following several years of bullishness about its potential. Zuckerberg predicted 2025 would be the year when a highly intelligent and personalized AI assistant reaches more than 1 billion people and he expects Meta’s offering to lead the way.

Zuckerberg expects it to become 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, as well as over time. Llama 4 is making great progress in training. Llama 4 mini is done with pre-training, and our reasoning models and larger model are looking good too. Our goal for Llama 4 is to lead.”

Zuckerberg also addressed the industry uproar from the recent release of Chinese DeepSeek’s open-source AI model, stating it is probably too early to have a strong opinion on what this means for the trajectory around infrastructure and capex. “One of the things that we’re talking about is there’s going be an open-source standard globally.” He argued it is important for the US to define the standard. Zuckerberg stated DeepSeek’s release served to strengthen his conviction Meta's open-source AI model is the right thing to do.

Meta CEO praised the government of US President Donald Trump, a turnaround in a rocky relationship during the latter’s first term which resulted in him being banned from Facebook. “This is also going to be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. You know, we now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies”, he said, noting a focus on ensuring domestic technology is successful.

Zuckerberg said he is optimistic about the progress and innovation the new government’s mentality could unlock. The executive seems keen on currying favor with President Trump, donating $1 million to his inauguration ceremony, reshaping Meta’s board of directors, and eliminating its domestic fact-checking program. Last week, Trump agreed to settle a lawsuit he filed against Meta for banning him, with the company to pay around $25 million, $22 million of which is earmarked for an eventual presidential library.