Chapter 1: What recent legal challenges are Meta and Alphabet facing?
Efficiency in AI could be just what the doctor ordered. This is Motley Fool Money. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Tyler Crowe, and today I'm joined by longtime Fool contributors, Matt Frankel and John Quast. We've got a really interesting show today. We're going to talk about some stepwise gains in the world of AI, but not in the way we've been talking about it for quite some time.
And we're going to hit a mailbag question because we are already getting them even after announcing that we're going to start taking them at our email address. We'll get into that in a second. But first, probably the biggest Newsday story outside of, you know, global war conflicts and things like that was there was some pretty big legislative decisions that happened for big tech.
And it wasn't exactly the way they wanted it to go.
Chapter 2: How are social media platforms being compared to the tobacco industry?
In a couple of pivotal cases, one of them, Meta Platforms and Alphabet, were found liable for a woman's mental health struggles related to social media addiction, and they had to pay punitive damages. Also, Meta lost a similar case in New Mexico related to misleading statements about safety on their sites. Now, admittedly, this one's kind of a hard one to discuss on an investing podcast.
I think there's a lot of emotions wrapped up in our use of social media and how that affects things. But there is going to be some investing takeaways here. But I wanted to get your guys' thoughts here. Are either of you shareholders in Meta? And as you kind of like viewed these verdicts and things like that, has it really changed your view of the company?
So to your first question, Tyler, no, I'm not a Meta shareholder personally. That's not a indictment on the company.
Chapter 3: What advancements in AI efficiency are being discussed?
I've gone on record that Meta is one of my more favorite companies in the Magnificent Seven. But to your second question, does this change my view of the company? The answer is not yet, but it could potentially. Specifically with the issue of mental health, I think that all the statistics point to an indisputable conclusion. We do have a mental health epidemic, unlike anything we've ever seen.
And I believe two things can be true here. First, social media apps are engineered to maximize user engagement. I don't think that that's a controversial take. It is how they generate revenue. Of course, they want their users on there as much as possible so they can generate ad revenue.
Chapter 4: How is ARM changing its business model for AI?
The second thing, I mean, I wouldn't blame social media apps entirely for mental health issues, but it does seem to be a contributing factor when it comes to this topic. I think if you're new to this discussion, the book I'd recommend is the anxious generation by Jonathan Haidt.
It does a great job of laying out the rise of anxiety in Western culture, also potential remedies, some suggestions by the author. I know this might sound off topic for an investing podcast, but I do believe it is pertinent. The jury verdict here is far from the final conclusion when it comes to Meta. Meta is going to appeal this case, it's going to go higher.
But if social media is ultimately deemed harmful...
like other harmful things we could see some substantial reforms from legislators that could have an impact on these cash cows so i'm not saying that it's the final word but it is something material to keep an eye on i'm not a meta shareholder but we do own shares of alphabet you know which is youtube's parent company in my household my wife does in her account it doesn't really change my opinion on either company i've already had my kind of opinion formed i'm a parent of young children
I think all three of us here are parents of young children, so I'm sure we have our own opinions of social media when it comes to how it impacts the mental health of our kids. I feel like people are becoming a lot more cognizant of the dangers of social media right now than they were a few years ago, which is what the basis of this case was.
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Chapter 5: What is Google's new memory compression method for AI models?
It was people who use social media online. and were addicted to it a few years ago. But my kids, I can tell you, won't be on social media until they're at least in their late teens. And one of the reasons is that it's so difficult to say what's safe and what's not. So I guess this doesn't change my opinion. I already kind of had this opinion about these companies.
This is a hard topic to discuss.
And I want to try to bring like the investment thesis around to this because one of the comparisons that I've seen with social media outlets and these cases that we saw was this, they're calling it like, for example, Bloomberg called it the tobacco moment, basically where legislative action starts to chip away at the business because we start to realize the physical mental harm that these can cause.
And it leads to a lot of legislative stuff. But here's the weird part about it.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of AI efficiency on memory chip companies?
is even after decades of litigation and fines and anti-smoking campaigns and declining tobacco use in the U.S., tobacco stocks have still been excellent investments over the years. And I want to contrast that a little bit to other companies where punitive legislation have kind of crippled the company. And I think of examples like BP with the Deepwater Horizon spill.
Companies that have been making perfluoroalkaline substances like PFAS, or we also call them forever chemicals, The liabilities on those, you have like Dow, DuPont, 3M, they've tried enormous corporate changes to try to mitigate the liabilities here.
And of those, over very long periods, none of these companies have really fared nearly as well when, for example, compared to tobacco as actual investments. Litigation against company meta is obviously bad and payouts are not ideal. But if social media is treated similar to tobacco, like in this tobacco moment, couldn't social media still have similar returns as investments in tobacco stocks?
I mean, like you said, these are still cash cows.
There's a lot to unpack there.
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Chapter 7: How should individual investors approach automatic investments?
I'm not sure if social media is about to have its tobacco moment yet. But I will say that the most interesting thing about this, it's not necessarily the fines that were just imposed. I mean, $3 million split between Meta and Alphabet is nothing for these companies, but it's really the precedents they could set. So the verdict related to safety on social media
that could certainly have some legislative impacts. I mean, for example, there are countries that already banned social media for people under 16 years old. So something like that could happen here potentially. That wouldn't exactly be crippling to these companies. It would have a material impact, but it wouldn't be crippling.
The mental health lawsuit, which is the one that was split between Meta and YouTube, is a little more interesting to me.
Chapter 8: What are the pros and cons of buying the dip versus automatic investing?
So Facebook has over 3 billion users worldwide. So would this pave the way for everyone whose life has been harmed by a social media addiction to potentially try to get millions of dollars from these companies? Virtually anyone, I know I could, can make the argument that their lives would have been better or more productive at least
If it weren't for social media, how much more could I have written over the years if I wasn't on Facebook? Keep in mind that this was an initial decision, as John correctly pointed out, Meta's going to appeal as they should. The final ruling could be a little more consequential.
I personally don't think we'll see a wave of successful litigation against these social media giants for mental health lawsuits, but we'll have to wait and see here.
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting hypothesis to compare tobacco to social media. I would agree with Matt here. I think it's far too early to draw that parallel. This case is going to go up the chain, and it remains unseen how things would be regulated if they become regulated at all. So...
Yeah, this is certainly something that's been kind of on the back burner for a long time. We've been thinking about it, but now with these litigation actions, it really starts to bring this into the forefront and something we'll be following in the coming weeks, months, years, we'll see.
After the break, we're going to talk about AI and one of the more interesting gains that we've seen in the past couple of weeks.
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This isn't a single news story that we want to talk about here about AI, but it's kind of a kernel from a couple of recent press releases that I want to think about as an essential topic when we think about AI. And it's making it happen more efficiently. I'm going to let you guys kind of cover the topics a little bit more with the news stories.
But one of them came out from Google talking about some of their ways of running AI models. And the other one came out from chip maker ARM, where they were announcing new AI-specific chip designs. So, John, why don't you cover ARM, Matt, and you can cover the Google announcement after that.
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