{"id":396136,"date":"2026-01-29T03:20:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-29T03:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396136\/"},"modified":"2026-01-29T03:20:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T03:20:08","slug":"facebook-owner-meta-to-nearly-double-ai-spending-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/396136\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook-owner Meta to nearly double AI spending this year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that he is expecting &#8220;2026 to be the year that AI dramatically changes the way we work.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">His comments came as Meta&#8217;s figures showed expenses rose faster than revenues, which squeezed profit margins, during the last three months of 2025.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meta shares were around 6.5% higher in extended trading in New York after the announcement.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In addition to explaining the potential benefits of such massive AI investment, Zuckerberg&#8217;s comments seemed to hint at further layoffs at the tech giant.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We&#8217;re starting to see projects that used to take big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Already this year, Meta has laid off several hundred workers mainly in its Reality Labs division, a part of the company that focuses on its &#8220;metaverse&#8221; ambitions, hardware products and AI initiatives. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Zuckerberg said Meta is investing more across the company in AI tools that help employees like software engineers complete more work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As workers use the tools to become &#8220;significantly more productive,&#8221; he said there is &#8220;a big delta between the people who do it and do it well and the people who don&#8217;t.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;What we were talking about is, I think it&#8217;s very hard for anyone exactly to predict what the shape of how organisations working is going to feel, but I just think the fact that agents are really starting to work now is quite profound,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Some in the industry warn that such major investments risk creating an AI bubble, similar to one seen in the dotcom boom that peaked in 2000.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Chuck Robbins, chairman and chief executive of Cisco Systems, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cr57p2ve8glo\" class=\"ssrcss-6mgqu7-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">told the BBC<\/a> that while AI could end up &#8220;bigger than the internet&#8221;, the current market is probably a bubble and some companies &#8220;won&#8217;t make it&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon has voiced similar concerns, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai said there was some &#8220;irrationality&#8221; to the AI boom.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sam Altman, whose company OpenAI kicked off the current obsession with AI in the tech industry, was more direct. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,&#8221; he said last year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that he is expecting &#8220;2026 to be the year that AI dramatically changes the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-396136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}