We recently compiled a list of the Top 20 Trending AI News And Analyst Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stands against the other trending AI stocks.

Artificial intelligence (AI) startups have taken the finance world by storm in the past few months. This interest was sparked by the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT by California-based OpenAI in late 2022. Since then, OpenAI has raised tens of billions of dollars in new funding and reached a valuation of over $150 billion. OpenAI revealed earlier this week that it had secured more than $6.6 billion in new funding through a financing round led by prominent names including Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Tiger Global, among others.

Read more about these developments by accessing 10 Unsexy AI Stocks According to Goldman Sachs and 10 Buzzing AI Stocks According to Goldman Sachs.

Perhaps one reason the startup is so popular is that it is projecting more than $3.5 billion in revenue this year and over $11 billion in 2025. AI startups in general have been quicker at making revenues than previous technology booms, according to an analysis of payment information by fintech firm Stripe. The report underlines that top AI groups are reaching millions of dollars in sales within a year. This timeline is far faster in the life cycle of a startup than comparable non-AI tech groups. The report relies on annual revenue data for the 100 highest-grossing privately held AI companies using Stripe, compared with a comparable basket of prominent Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) start-ups as of July 2018.

The report has gained a lot of traction since Stripe customers include OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, GitHub and Midjourney, among others. Stripe claims, per Financial Times, that AI start-ups took a median 11 months to hit $1 million in annual revenue after their first sales on Stripe, compared with 15 months for the previous generation of SaaS companies. AI start-ups that have scaled to more than $30 million in annual revenue achieved the milestone in 20 months — five times faster than past SaaS companies. Emily Sands, the head of information at Stripe, highlights that unlike past generations of software companies, AI companies paid compute costs straight out of the gate, and were under pressure to build monetisation faster.

Read more about these developments by accessing 33 Most Important AI Companies You Should Pay Attention To and 20 Industrial Stocks Already Riding the AI Wave.

Our Methodology

For this article, we selected AI stocks based on the latest news and analyst ratings. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

A team of developers working in unison to create the company's messaging application.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 219

Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) engages in the development of products that enable people to connect and share with friends and family through mobile devices, personal computers, virtual reality headsets, and wearables worldwide. Latest reports, published by tech news website Tech Crunch, claim that the company could use the photos and videos that users take on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to train its AI. The smart glasses were announced at a Meta event last month. The report further underlined that Emil Vazquez, the policy communications manager at Meta, had said that where multimodal AI was available, currently US and Canada, images and videos shared with Meta AI may be used to improve it per a Privacy Policy.

Wells Fargo analyst Ken Gawrelski recently raised the price target on Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) stock to $652 from $647 and kept an Overweight rating on the shares ahead of its earnings report. The advisory predicted another robust quarter and solid forward quarter guide, but noted it was unlikely to materially alter Wells' above-consensus 2025 EPS estimate of $27-plus. The stock is increasingly viewed as an AI winner, but it is likely range bound until 2025 OpEx/CapEx guide on Q4 2024 EPS call, the advisory added.

Overall META ranks 4th on our list of the trending AI stocks now. While we acknowledge the potential of META as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than META but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.