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Meta's Spark model gets lavished with Wall Street praise
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It was a well-received AI day for Meta (META). Meta stock rose 6.5% to $612.42 on Wednesday following the afternoon unveiling of its new Muse Spark flagship model from its much hyped new Meta Superintelligence Labs. The stock's gain added about $111 billion to Meta's market cap, which now stands at $1.59 trillion. Muse Spark, aimed at better competing with OpenAI's (OPAI.PVT) ChatGPT and Anthropic's (ANTH.PVT) Claude, is a native multimodal reasoning model that processes text and images simultaneously. It is currently powering the Meta AI app and website, and Meta plans to roll it out across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Ray-Ban AI glasses in the coming weeks. Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the model as "the first step on our scaling ladder" and the result of a "ground-up overhaul" of the company's entire AI stack. The model is designed to move beyond simple chatbots toward AI agents that don't just answer questions but "do things for you". Wall Street praised the release in a series of notes on Thursday morning. To this group, it was good to see a strong new tech release from Zuckerberg's lavish spending on AI experts over the past year. Here's what Wall Street had to say about the release: "Meta's unveiling of Muse Spark showed Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) has made meaningful progress over a ~9-month period, and provides a look at Meta's vision of consumer AI," Patterson said, maintaining his Overweight rating on the stock. "Coupled with practical AI applications for Manus integrations and progress with ranking models, we believe the market is under-appreciating platform stickiness for consumers and advertisers. Further, recent ad checks leave us more confident in a 20%+ medium-term growth algorithm, as such we raise estimates. Our lower price target of $760 (22x [estimated 2027 price-to-earnings ratio]) reflects a more conservative multiple amid market volatility." "Meta’s launch of its Muse Spark frontier model creates greater visibility into MSL’s product strategy as it builds out personal superintelligence and with the launch, we believe it removes a key overhang given expectation of a delayed release," Josey wrote. "Muse Spark now powers the Meta AI app and website with plans to roll-out across Meta’s family of apps and AI glasses which we believe can create newer engagement use cases over time. "Bigger picture, with greater visibility into MSL’s frontier model strategy, ads innovations, engagement strength, and a continued focus on operational efficiency, we believe Meta is likely to report 1Q results above consensus expectations. We reiterate our Buy rating and $850 target price." "We believe investor expectations for Meta's path to the frontier became quite low following 4Q earnings, management commentary in March, and press reports suggesting further model delays and Meta potentially leveraging Gemini in the interim," Anmuth wrote. "Accordingly, the launch of Muse Spark should provide increased confidence in Meta’s scaling trajectory and improve investor sentiment. We reiterate our Overweight rating and our December 2026 price target of $825 is based on ~26x our 2027 estimated GAAP [earnings per share] of $31.50." Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com. Click here for in-depth analysis of the latest stock market news and events moving stock prices Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
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