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Meta's Investment in Innodata Boosts Stock Price

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly.MUSE CHECKOUT:Shares of Shopify, Affirm, Block, eBayand PayPalcame under pressure on Wednesday after a Muse checkout screenshot showing Meta Payas an option sparked concerns about potential disruption from Meta's personal AI agent. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Scott Devitt said Meta Pay does not appear to be a new payment method, but rather an extension of Meta's existing wallet integrated into the Muse experience.The analyst argued that Meta Pay, in its current form, does not appear disruptive to Shopify Payments or Shop Pay. Rosenblatt also said it does not view a 7% selloff in Shopify shares as justified based on the information available.MUSE INTEGRATION:Shares of Trivagoalso slipped almost 10% in Wednesday morning trading. This comes after Expediasaid via X that, "Here at Expedia, we love planning trips. Soon, your personal AI agent will too. We're joining Muse: tell it where you're headed and it can work with Expedia to sort your hotels, and everything in between." Muse is Meta'snew personal AI assistant.MIDDLE EAST INVESTMENT:Microsoftsaid it will expand its cloud and AI infrastructure across the Middle East. The companyin a blog, "Microsoft will continue to invest in cloud and AI infrastructure across the region, expanding capacity, launching new capabilities, and delivering long-term infrastructure commitments. We plan to invest more than $10 billion in capital and operating expenses between now and 2030 in the region."OPEN-MODEL INFERENCE:Crusoe, the first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, and Thinking Machines Lab announced a $65M annual agreement to power inference for the lab's open models on Crusoe Cloud. Through Crusoe Managed Inference, Thinking Machines Lab will serve a range of production workloads - including its Inkling models, GLM 5.2 and 5.3, and its own fine-tuned variants - on a dedicated Tailored Deployment of Nvidia HGX B200 systems connected with Nvidia Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, engineered for high-throughput, cost-efficient serving at scale. Crusoe will run and support the cluster directly as a Tailored Deployment - a dedicated, benchmarked, SLA-backed endpoint - giving Thinking Machines Lab the price-performance and headroom to scale without managing its own inference stack. The companies are also looking to expand into batch inference for large-scale synthetic data generation, turning inference into a flywheel for research. Thinking Machines Lab joins a roster that has taken Crusoe Managed Inference past $100M in contracted ARR less than a year from launch.CHEAPER GPT-6 FAMILY MODELS:OpenAI is introducing GPT-6 Sol and Luna. "Earlier this month, we introduced GPT-6 Astra, the most intelligent and aligned model in the world. While the most demanding and important projects still call for Astra's full depth, work happens at different scales, rhythms, and budgets. That's why we're expanding the GPT-6 universe with GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. GPT-6 Astra introduced a new generation of intelligence - these models help distribute the benefits of that intelligence by advancing the frontier on cost efficiency. We trained GPT-6 Sol and Luna with similar methods as GPT-6 Astra, bringing the advances behind Astra's state-of-the-art performance in professional work, factuality, coding, computer use, and alignment to faster, more affordable models," the company explained. "The GPT-6 models lead across the cost - intelligence curve, combining exceptional capabilities at every tier with infrastructure that delivers them efficiently at scale. Improvements in caching and inference let us serve these models at lower cost, and we're passing those savings directly on to users and customers by reducing API prices for Sol and Luna by 50% compared with their GPT-5.6 promotional pricing. Together, these improvements make advanced AI practical for more everyday tasks and applications at scale."WIN FOR INNODATA:Meta's$200B bet on AI already transformed an obscure New Jersey-based data company called Innodata, Hunterbrook's Sam Koppelman, Michelle Cera and Matthew Termine say in a recently published. "Hiring records and former employees reveal how closely the two are connected. Now, amid fears Meta might move work away from Innodata after the tech giant's investment in Scale AI, a new contract focused on the 'personalization of long-horizon agents' points toward Innodata's involvement in Muse," the report reads. Hunterbrook notes that according to interviews with former employees and reviews of job postings, Meta is Innodata's largest customer. Based on Hunterbrook Media's reporting, at the time of publication Hunterbrook Capital is long Innodata.

Meta Pay Sparks E-commerce Stock Drop, Shopify Down Over 7%

Shares of e commerce and payment companies came under pressure on Wednesday after a Muse checkout screenshot showing Meta Payas an option sparked concerns about potential disruption from Meta's personal AI agent. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Scott Devitt said Meta Pay does not appear to be a new payment method, but rather an extension of Meta's existing wallet integrated into the Muse experience.META PAY:Shares of Shopify, Affirm, Block, eBayand PayPalmoved into negative territory after X user @wongmjane posted an image of a Muse checkout flow listing Meta Pay alongside Link by Stripe and Shop Pay. The post triggered a sharp reaction from investors, sending Shopify shares down more than 7% early in the session.Devitt noted that investors "freaked out" over the screenshot, but emphasized that Meta Pay is simply the same wallet used across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. According to Muse, connecting Meta Pay "just lets me use those saved cards when you ask me to buy something," with all card details remaining within the Meta Accounts Center.The analyst argued that Meta Pay, in its current form, does not appear disruptive to Shopify Payments or Shop Pay. Rosenblatt also said it does not view a 7% selloff in Shopify shares as justified based on the information available.PRICE ACTION:Shares of Shopify and Affirm are down roughly 5% and 4% i n morning trading, respectively, while Block is off about 3%.