00:00:00 Speaker A
Now time for some of today’s trending tickers. We are watching meta social media stocks and names in the crypto space. Yahoo Finance’s Josh Shafer here to help me break them down a little bit more and do a deep dive on some of them. First up here, we got to set the stage and talk about OpenAI Sam Altman saying that meta is offering $100 million bonuses to open AI staff in attempt to build up meta’s talent pool. The Facebook parent company getting more aggressive in attempts to improve its own artificial intelligence offerings. Meta reportedly delaying the rollout of its latest AI model because of concerns around quality. And CNBC also reporting that Zuckerberg is frustrated with meta’s standing in big tech’s AI race. This comes as meta announcing it will pay $14 billion for 49% stake in scale AI as well.
00:01:01 Brad
A hundred million dollar bonuses? I feel like we got to just press pause on that for a second. That’s a pretty significant bonus.
00:01:08 Speaker A
That’s crazy.
00:01:09 Brad
It makes you want to go on Udemy and start to take some quick coding classes or whatever you need necessary to qualify.
00:01:18 Speaker A
You and I are big sports fans and even someone like Patrick Mahomes, I don’t think he’s barely getting $100 million signing bonus, right? It’s pretty shocking, but I think it gives you an idea obviously what you were just hinting at of where meta feels like they’re at here and maybe needing to do a little bit more. Interesting to me because meta is one of the few companies on earnings calls that has been able to show how AI is helping their business, right? When you think about something like what they’re doing with reels, how AI is playing a role in that, but this seems to be going for people from OpenAI. It seems to be more of that large language model play and doing something a little bit different and more targeted closer to what OpenAI is doing, not necessarily just using AI and sort of the AI use case space, but meta trying to be an industry leader in that large language model part of the AI story.
00:02:32 Speaker B
Yeah, seemed like he made this acknowledgement on the Uncapped podcast, which is hosted by his brother, we should note. Also here, it’s interesting, this has been quite the week for OpenAI and getting some of their own major agreements here, of course, talking through some of the most recent developments here. They’ve got their first partnership with OpenAI and the government initiative, a pilot program with the US Department of Defense. It’s a massive move forward for them and the chief digital and artificial intelligence office contract is worth about $200 million and the ceiling price for it. And essentially this is going to allow the Defense Department to identify and prototype frontier AI and how that can transform its own administrative operations. And so we’ll see exactly what that looks like in practice, but this is a major step forward for OpenAI and acknowledgement of the power that they do have behind their engine.
00:03:55 Speaker A
I’m taking a look at our private market data that we have now on Yahoo Finance. OpenAI’s estimated valuation per our data, $324 billion.
00:04:13 Speaker B
Yes.
00:04:13 Speaker A
If that company ever comes public, it might be the biggest IPO ever, Brad.
00:04:19 Brad
It could potentially be in the throws of it. Yes, for sure. I’m old enough to remember when Saudi Aramco went public though. That was a pretty large one too. Next up, we’re checking out shares of social media stocks as President Trump set to delay Tik Tok’s divest or ban deadline by another 90 days. The White House confirming that the president will sign an executive order this week extending the deadline, granting the administration more time to close a deal and keep Tik Tok working in the US. This would mark the president’s third extension of the ban which requires Tik Tok’s Chinese parent company sell off the US version of the app. There you’re taking a look at some of the social media stocks on the move here pre-market. And of course it is one big pull for some of the advertising dollars that would go to Tik Tok versus a meta versus Snap versus Pinterest and how they all battle for those dollars. And ultimately, for Tik Tok, they’ve been able to quickly grow out their user base, make sure that they’re also wooing some of those advertising dollars and how they’re doing so is also making for a very competitive threat to these companies.
00:05:54 Speaker A
It’s starting to feel like this ban just isn’t going to happen, right? Because when things continuously get pushed back, continuously get pushed back, I just start to lose a little bit of confidence.
00:06:11 Speaker B
Such a pawn as part of the geopolitical discussions now.
00:06:15 Speaker A
Right, exactly, right? And that’s why it keeps coming up. I think when we’re talking about the social media stocks, I mean, the most interesting one to me is Snap, right? Just thinking about how Snap has performed as a stock over the last couple of years, I mean, it’s down 25% year to date, down almost 50% over the last year. Snap needs some help, right? To bring in more users and drive future growth. Meta has still been successful with the rise of Tik Tok, right? I don’t think people have an issue necessarily with where Instagram is at and what meta is doing with some of their social platforms. But Snap could use the boost. And so that’s sort of the stock to watch for me as this continues and if we ever do actually get any form of a ban.
00:07:21 Speaker B
Yeah, Snap for their own, you know, defense here, the brand of ghost face chilla, they said that their community grew to 460 million daily active users, an increase of 38 million year over year in the most recent quarter and Q1 here. Q1 revenue increased 14% year over year, 1.36 billion. And it really comes back to some of direct response advertising, DR advertising as they talk about it on the call. We got to get to this last one here as well. Finally, the Senate passing the genius stable coin bill and sending it to the house in a big legislative step for the crypto industry. The bill largely requires stable coin issuers align with the same regulations that tradfi, traditional financial institutions must follow. A broader bill that currently sits in the house called the Clarity Act, seeking to regulate the crypto market as a whole here. There you’re taking a look at Coinbase, Robin Hood and Circle on the move to the upside on this passage here for the genius bill.
00:08:42 Speaker A
Another headline that makes Circle stock go up, right? It feels like that stock has gone up almost every day since it’s IPO a few weeks ago.
00:08:49 Speaker B
Yes.
00:08:53 Speaker A
But the stable coin conversation feels like it’s really starting to heat up right now, doesn’t it? I was talking to Julie Hyman about this last week and just we get in these moments where everyone needs to have a coin or everyone needs to have a stable coin or everyone needs to have their AI strategy. And when you think about the report last week of Walmart and Amazon starting to look into this, I just wonder how that conversation grows if as this act continues to work its way through the house. How does that conversation grow to? How many companies are going to try and deploy some version of a stable coin strategy? And is that report that we got last week about Walmart and Amazon, was that a they’re looking into it or how seriously are they looking into it and are you and I going to need to get Amazon stable coin at some point to use Prime?
00:10:02 Speaker B
Look, all we’ve been discussing in our morning meetings and afternoon meeting yesterday was that this might say might make meta say, hey, hold my beer. DM’s coming back. You can scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks with Yahoo Finance’s trending tickers page.
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