5 Best Hot Stocks To Buy Now

3. Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 234

Analysts and hedge funds are bullish on Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META), thanks to the stunning turnaround Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) posted earlier in the year due to its AI-related initiatives and an overall stronger usage growth on its platforms. Ronald Josey from Citi said Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) is one of his top picks for 2024.

A total of 234 hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey reported having stakes in Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) as of the end of the September quarter. The most significant stakeholder of Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) was Rajiv Jain’s GQG Partners which owns a $3.3 billion stake in Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META).

Blue Tower Asset Management made the following comment about Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) in its Q3 2023 investor letter:

“On February 24, 2023, Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) released Llama, their LLM project, with the code being open-source but the training weights being kept proprietary. Nonetheless, within a week the training weights were leaked for the project. This release of the weights for 65 billion parameter model was a huge gift for open-source programmers to begin experimenting upon. Within weeks, other developers were creating innovations building on the model. There has been a race towards developing low-budget fine-tuning projects that can be trained for specific applications at the cost of a few hundred dollars in some cases. Some of these LLM projects can even be run on individual computers rather than data centers.

After the voluntary release of Llama’s architecture as open-source, the leak of the model weights ended up being a blessing in disguise for Meta. The innovation and improvements that followed were all built on Meta’s AI codebase. They were able to get these innovations without needing to pay any of the open-source developers for their efforts. This also demonstrates that the business advantage of the large tech companies is not in their models or AI codebase. Any innovations that the companies develop are unlikely to stay within the walls of the companies due to the mobility of researchers being poached between companies by recruiters. However, as these new model improvement technologies are made, the big tech companies have a scale advantage. They will be able to employ it into models that have more data, more compute budget, more parameters and therefore more intelligence in the resulting neural net.”