By Angela Palumbo
Meta Platforms launched its latest artificial intelligence models over the weekend even as news about tariffs and their potential economic effects kept investors on edge.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an Instagram video on Saturday that Meta AI -- the company's ChatGPT competitor -- is "getting a big upgrade today." The company announced a new series of Llama 4 models, including Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick.
"AI wars keep progressing despite tariff wars," Roth MKM analyst Rohit Kulkarni wrote in a research note on Monday. He rates Meta as a Buy with a target of $730 for the stock price.
Shares of Meta were 2.1% higher at $515.29 on Monday. The S&P 500 was up 0.3%.
According to Meta, Llama 4 Scout is more powerful than all previous- generation Llama models and fits in a single Nvidia H100 GPU. Llama 4 Maverick, meanwhile, beats ChatGPT-4o and Alphabet's Gemini 2.0 Flash "across a broad range of widely reported benchmarks," while also achieving comparable results to the DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding, Meta said.
Users can access Llama 4 in Meta AI through WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram Direct, or the Meta AI website.
Two more models are on the way: Llama 4 Reasoning and Llama 4 Behemoth. Zuckerberg said more news is to come on Llama 4 Reasoning in the next month, and that he isn't aware of anyone training a larger model than Llama 4 Behemoth. More details on this model are to come soon.
The news comes as investors pull out of highly valued tech stocks in response to fear that the tariffs Trump announced on Wednesday will lead to a recession. The Nasdaq Composite and Meta have both dropped 11% since Wednesday's close.
Meta said in January that it expects full-year capital expenditures to be between $60 billion and $65 billion, driven in part by increased investments in generative AI.
"I've said for a while that I think open source AI is going to become the leading models, and with Llama 4, this is starting to happen," Zuckerberg said on Instagram.
Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 07, 2025 14:53 ET (18:53 GMT)
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