- Meta assembled four “war rooms” of engineers to respond to potential breakthrough AI developments spearheaded by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta assembled four war rooms of engineers to determine how a Chinese hedge fund managed to release an AI game-changer that may already rival its own technology, The Information reported.
DeepSeek, an AI startup backed by hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management, this month released a version of its AI chatbot, R1, that it says can perform just as well as competing models such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost.
The potentially groundbreaking, open-source tech has called into question the gargantuan AI investments made by American companies and has put Meta’s AI-dedicated team on high alert.
Meta AI infrastructure director Mathew Oldham has reportedly told colleagues that DeepSeek’s newest model could outperform even the next version of Meta’s Llama AI, which Zuckerberg said could be released in “early 2025,” The Informationreported Sunday. The report cited two employees with direct knowledge of Meta’s efforts to catch up.
Of the four war rooms Meta has created to respond to DeepSeek’s potential breakthrough, two teams will try to decipher how High-Flyer lowered the cost of training and running DeepSeek with the goal of using those tactics for Llama, the outlet reported, citing one anonymous Meta employee.
Among the remaining two teams, one will try to find out which data DeepSeek used to train its model, and the other will consider how Llama can restructure its models based on attributes of the DeepSeek models, The Information reported.
Meta did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“We regularly evaluate all competitive models in our development process and have done so since [the company’s] Gen Al [group] was formed,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to The Information. “Llama has been foundational in establishing the ecosystem for open-source AI models and we couldn’t be more excited to extend this leadership with the upcoming release of Llama 4.”
On Friday, Meta CEO Zuckerberg announced that the company would spend as much as $65 billion on projects related to AI in the coming year, including construction of a large data center and more AI hires.
The announcement came just days after OpenAI, in partnership with SoftBank, Oracle, and others, announced a $500 billion White House–backed AI infrastructure project called Stargate that will build dozens of new data centers across the U.S.
