Can Meta Be A Solid Rival To Leading LLMs Like GPT4? Analyst Weighs In

BofA Securities analyst Justin Post reiterated a Buy rating on Meta Platforms, Inc. META, with a forecast of $550.

According to the analyst, AI/ML integrations are playing a crucial role in boosting usage and ad spending in 2024, aiding critical areas of content engagement, ad creative generation, campaign optimization, ad measurement, and back-end campaign cost savings for advertisers.

The analyst is also upbeat about Meta’s highlights at a recent investor conference, which focused on big AI improvements and opportunities around AI agents (using LLAMA3), Meta’s recommendation engine, and the unification of the video platform to drive more views. 

On the risk side, Meta has less risk of disruption of legacy usage than Alphabet Inc. GOOG, with potential advantages over most Online ad companies who don’t have comparable compute infrastructure, LLM, or user data. 

However, the analyst said that he is sensing some hope among investors that the returns on AI investment are compelling enough to potentially pull some investment from the Metaverse. 

Meta plans to release two of the smaller LLAMA3 models soon, but the multimodal version in summer, the analyst adds. 

Meta hasn’t confirmed the technical details of the models, but it’s expected to address some of LLAMA2’s limitations, like the difficulty of handling multilingual contexts, according to Post. 

Per press reports, LLAMA3 is expected to rival the capabilities of leading LLMs like GPT4, with 140 billion parameters (versus 70 billion parameters for LLAMA 2) and multimodal analysis.

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Price Action: META shares are trading lower by 0.32% to $517.98 on the last check Thursday. 

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