We're only a month into 2025, and it's shaping up to be an interesting year, to say the least. There's a heavy focus on AI right now, especially with the U.S. government's $500 billion investment in AI and the recent rise of DeepSeek, the best ChatGPT alternative we've seen in a while.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows this, and is trying his best to capitalize on the demand for solid, reliable AI models. In a leaked all-hands meeting reviewed by Business Insider, Zuckerberg warns employees to "buckle up" for an "intense" year with a massive focus on AI.
In a contradictory statement, Zuckerberg can be heard saying, "This is a marathon, not a sprint. But honestly, this year feels a little more like a sprint to me."
Zuckerberg is in a race against multiple other companies —Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and many more — to create a "highly intelligent and personalized" digital assistant," which is what he believes is the key to success in 2025.
The rise of AI will be a double-edged sword
In the leaked recording, Zuckerberg can be heard predicting that 2025 will be the first year a "highly intelligent and personalized" digital assistant reaches 1 billion total users. And he thinks that "whoever gets there first is going to have a long-term, durable advantage towards building one of the most important products in history."
That sounds like a bold claim, but it's honestly not that far-fetched. When DeepSeek recently launched and demonstrated true competition for ChatGPT, stocks were affected almost instantly. We'll likely see the same stock market flux when one company prevails over the others with the "best" AI digital assistant.
Zuckerberg also thinks 2025 will be the year Meta starts seeing AI agents writing software and playing a bigger role in the company. When asked if this would lead to job cuts, he said it was "hard to know" and that it could end up leading to more engineering roles to harness AI, despite some roles becoming redundant in the process.
In non-AI news, Zuckerberg said Meta would be moving away from a third-party fact-checkers system to an X-style community notes system, rolling back DEI programs, and "resetting" relationships with governments worldwide.
How Meta plans to tackle this goal of being the first company with a personalized, super smart digital assistant, we don't know. But as with most technologies, winning in that race will require some deep pockets.
