There’s been no shortage of bad blood between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in recent days, up to the point where there’s been talk of an MMA cage match between the two. Yet with Musk expanding into artificial intelligence with xAI, and Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) looking to do the same, can either of them hope to catch up to Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), who are already so far ahead?
Musk is at a disadvantage out of the gate. Granted, he has immense personal wealth and a reputation as a visionary. But he’s already discovered first-hand what happens when he threatens that reputation in any way, particularly by diffusing his attention over multiple companies. Meanwhile, Meta Platforms, has an advantage by branching out into AI, which it’s planning to do, due to its large user base. Though the commercial applications are limited right now—mostly adding chatbots to current properties like Facebook and Instagram—Meta is making friends by offering its language model as open-source tools for research purposes.
All of that can only go so far against Microsoft and Google, who are the front-runners in the field right now. Meta’s plans to expand into the commercial market are about to go live, and give commercial interests the ability to make their own AI-driven software. Though Meta doesn’t plan to charge for that platform, it’s still going to be competing with the two leading names in the field. Yet, with Meta and xAI, both have access to large amounts of human discourse that the other two don’t: social media. Meta can use Threads as fodder for a language model, while xAI can tap Twitter.
That makes for a very complex field with a lot of possibilities. Meta, Microsoft and Google are all rated Strong Buys by analyst consensus, though of the three, only Meta has a downside. A fractional downside of 0.97%, with an average price target of $311.71, but a downside nonetheless.