#SocialStocks: OpenAI forms board to make safety and security decisions

Welcome to “#SocialStocks,” The Fly’s weekly recap of Wall Street’s reactions to social media stock news.

SAFETY FIRST: The OpenAI Board announced that it has formed a Safety and Security Committee led by directors Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman. This committee will be responsible for making recommendations to the full Board on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations. “OpenAI has recently begun training its next frontier model and we anticipate the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI. While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment. A first task of the Safety and Security Committee will be to evaluate and further develop OpenAI’s processes and safeguards over the next 90 days. At the conclusion of the 90 days, the Safety and Security Committee will share their recommendations with the full Board. Following the full Board’s review, OpenAI will publicly share an update on adopted recommendations in a manner that is consistent with safety and security.”

TIKTOK TRIAL: On Tuesday, a U.S. appeals court established an expedited timeline to address legal challenges related to a recent law mandating that China-based ByteDance divest TikTok’s U.S. assets by January 19 or risk a ban, David Shepardson of Reuters reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia scheduled oral arguments for September after TikTok, ByteDance, and a coalition of TikTok content creators, in collaboration with the Justice Department, requested an accelerated hearing earlier this month.

ADDRESSING ELECTION CONCERNS: Meta Platforms (META) has added safety features to its misinformation tracking tool CrowdTangle for use during European Parliament elections in an attempt to allay EU concerns that triggered an investigation last month into the impact of its decision to phase out the tool, Reuters’ Foo Yun Chee reported. The U.S. social media platform last week said candidates for next month’s polls will be shown a notification at the top of their feed in Facebook and Instagram on how to protect themselves and their accounts.

AI ASSISTANT MONETIZATION: Meta is considering charging users for a more advanced version of Meta AI and is developing AI agents that can complete tasks without human supervision, The Information’s Kalley Huang noted. Google (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), OpenAI, and Anthropic all offer $20-per-month subscriptions to their chatbots, according to the report.

GOING HOLLYWOOD: Alphabet and Meta have been in talks with big Hollywood studios about licensing content for use in the tech companies’ generative AI tools, Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw wrote, citing people familiar with the matter. Both tech giants are working on tech that can create sound and video clips from a single text prompt and have offered tens of millions of dollars to partner with major studios in some capacity, the author says, noting that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is also having similar discussions with studios.

ANALYST COMMENTARY: Piper Sandler raised the firm’s price target on Pinterest (PINS) to $52 from $50 and reiterated an Overweight rating on the shares. Piper remains bullish on Pinterest and reiterates its top SMID pick. The firm thinks market improvement only contributed about 60bps to the Q1 2024 revenue acceleration, suggesting a step-up in out-performance vs the market i.e., “value capture.”