We recently compiled a list of the 10 Biggest AI Stories and Ratings Updates You Should Not Miss This Week. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) stands against the other AI stories.
Are Growing Patents in AI from China a Threat to the US?
China and the United States continue to compete against each other as the AI boom continues to reign in the tech industry. On July 2, Reuters reported that China plans to develop 50 new national and industrial standards for artificial intelligence by 2026. The country aims to standardize systems in the artificial intelligence sector by providing thorough guidelines to companies and budding startups. Furthermore, on July 3, Reuters reported that China filed six times more patents than the United States for inventions in AI like chatbots. On a global scale, more than 50,000 patent applications were filed in the past decade, a quarter of which were filed in 2023 alone. China filed 38,000 generative AI applications between 2014 and 2023, while the United States only filed slightly over 6,200 applications during the same period. Of the total applications, ByteDance, Alibaba Group, and Microsoft filed the largest number of applications. The report added that Chinese patent applications covered a wider range of sectors such as autonomous driving, publishing, and document management. South Korea, Japan, and India were ranked third, fourth, and fifth with the highest number of patent applications.
The United States, on the other hand, has reportedly accumulated $55.6 billion in venture capital funding in the second quarter of 2024, the highest quarterly total in two years. On July 3, Reuters reported that the surge in venture capital funding is driven by developments in artificial intelligence. Such is a 47% increase from the $37.8 billion raised by startups in the first quarter of 2024. Significant investments include $6 billion by Elon Musk’s xAI and $1.1 billion raised by CoreWeave. Previously, venture capital funding took a hit, reporting $35.4 billion in the second quarter of 2023 amid high interest rates and sluggish economic growth. While venture capital and investment in AI are increasing, the IPO market remains sluggish.
OpenAI & Anthropic: A Comparative Analysis
While the threat of Chinese innovations looms over the United States, startups in the country are disrupting the industry with key innovations. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is a leading artificial intelligence company based in the United States. In February this year, OpenAI closed a deal with venture capital firm Thrive Capital, allowing it to buy some of its shares in a tender offer, bringing its total valuation to $80 billion. This is a threefold increase in its value from a few months ago in 2023.
On June 10, OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership to integrate ChatGPT into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Users will now be able to access ChatGPT’s capabilities on all these devices without having to switch tools. Siri will also be able to reach ChatGPT when a user asks a question and will present them with an answer directly from the chatbot. ChatGPT will be integrated into Apple’s writing tools, allowing users to create content when required. The development ensures that user security remains intact. Requests are not stored by OpenAI and IP addresses remain obscured. Users may connect to their ChatGPT account, allowing them to choose their data preferences. The integration will be executed later this year and can be accessed for free without having to create an account.
In another update, Apple is reportedly positioned to join OpenAI’s board. On July 2, Reuters reported that Apple is set to get an observer role on OpenAI’s board, part of the agreement made by the two entities a month ago. Phill Schiller, head of Apple App Store and former marketing chief, was selected for this position. The board agreement will take effect later this year. As of yet, Schiller has not attended any meetings.
Anthropic, OpenAI’s direct competitor, is an artificial intelligence startup founded in 2021. The company is led by Dario and Daniela Amodei as CEO and president. The safety and research company is popular for its safety-oriented language models that produce reliable interpretable, and steerable AI systems. On March 27, CNBC reported that Amazon invested an additional $2.75 billion in the startup, bringing its total investment to $4 billion. Anthropic’s valuation at that time was $18.4 billion and closed five different funding rounds worth $7.3 billion in the past year. Amazon will remain a minority stakeholder in the company. Last year, Alphabet’s Google announced an investment worth $2 billion into Anthropic adding to its $550 million funding from earlier.
Claude is the company’s AI platform able to conduct advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation, and multilingual processing. Anthropic recently launched Claude 3.5 Sonner, its first release from the Claude 3.5 family. Claude 2.5 Sonnet has set a new benchmark for graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate-level knowledge, and coding proficiency. The new AI platform operates at twice the speed of Clause Opus. Based on an internal evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet was able to solve 64% of problems. On the contrary, Claude Opus was able to solve only 38% of problems. On July 2, Anthropic announced the launch of a new initiative for a robust third-party evaluation ecosystem. The new initiative will be able to fund evaluations developed by third-party organizations to measure advanced features in AI models. The company strongly believes that the initiative will enhance AI safety level assessments, improve safety metrics, and develop infrastructure and tools for evaluations. The safety level assessments will encompass cybersecurity, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risks, model autonomy, national security risks, and social manipulation.
A lot is going on in the AI space and several companies have emerged as interesting AI stories. We have compiled a list of the most interesting AI stories on Wall Street by studying many reports and publications and watching interviews. The list is sorted in ascending order of hedge fund sentiment, which was sourced from Insider Monkey’s proprietary database that tracks over 900 elite money managers.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A team of developers working in unison to create the company’s messaging application.
Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 246
Meta Platforms Inc’s (NASDAQ:META) moves in AI contribute to its ranking as the third biggest AI story on our list. Meta AI, built on Llama 3, is one of the most advanced AI models developed by the company. Meta AI is capable of complex reasoning, problem-solving, and understanding instructions. Like Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) is also advancing its AI infrastructure capabilities. In April, the company introduced its next generation of custom chips to manage its AI workloads. The new chips will significantly enhance the company’s recommendation ads model on Facebook and Instagram. 30% of posts on Facebook and 50% of content on Instagram are delivered by the company’s AI recommendation system. The Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) v1 is the company’s first inference accelerator designed in-house, capable of handling high-complexity and low-complexity ranking and recommendation models. The company expects expenditure on AI to expand. As per a recent update, the company looks forward to increasing its capital expenditure from $35 billion to $40 billion, driven by large investments in AI, in 2024.
Meta’s growth in producing responsible AI models can be attributed to its strong research capabilities. On June 18, Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) launched new AI research models to boost innovation at a much larger scale than before. The company released five new models including image-to-text and text-to-music generation models, a prediction model, and a model that detects AI-generated speech. Meta Chameleon is a family of mixed-modal models capable of understanding, processing, and delivering both text and words at the same time. The AI can take any input of text and words to output any combination of text and words required. To replace standard text and idea generation, the company proposed a multi-token prediction approach that would make large language models significantly more efficient. This approach trains models to predict a variety of future words instantly, replacing the common one-at-a-time approach.
Justin Patterson, Keybanc’s managing director, recently talked about Meta’s position in the market in an interview on Yahoo Finance. He raised his price target from $475 to $540 amid Meta’s strong advertising growth. Patterson pointed out that Meta’s ad revenue is increasing every quarter which is a reflection of strong demand and he is optimistic about returns from the AI advertising cycle. Overall, Patterson has noticed stronger engagement across all of Meta’s platforms due to AI investments and improvements in its ad models.
META was held by 246 hedge funds at the close of Q1 2024, with total stakes amounting to $46.92 billion. Of those, Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group was the highest stakeholder with a position of $7.07 billion.
On July 3, Loop Capital reiterated a buy rating on the stock and maintained its price target of $550. Based on price targets from 67 analysts, META’s median price forecast of $530 represents an upside of almost 4% from its current price of $509.65.
Overall META ranks 3rd on our list of the biggest AI stories right now. You can visit 10 Biggest AI Stories and Ratings Updates You Should Not Miss This Week to see the other AI stories that are on hedge funds’ radar. While we acknowledge the potential of META as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than META but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
