Meta's AI Turning Point: Why Wall Street Is Betting Big on SAM 3

For years, investors have questioned whether Meta can truly compete in the artificial intelligence race. While the Magnificent Seven company has leveraged AI to accelerate advertising revenue growth throughout 2025, its LLaMa models failed to impress the tech community. Combined with Reality Labs’ ongoing losses, Meta’s long-term AI monetization strategy remained unclear. That skepticism may be shifting. Meta just introduced Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3)—a computer vision breakthrough that has Wall Street reconsidering the company’s AI moment.

Why SAM 3 Is Reshaping Expectations

SAM 3 is reshaping how the industry thinks about Meta’s AI capabilities. The model ranks at the top of Roboflow’s AI Vision Model Rankings, allowing users to detect, segment, and track objects in images and videos through simple text prompts. Tech analysts have dubbed it a “ChatGPT moment” for video and visual applications—and for good reason.

What makes SAM 3 truly transformative isn’t just its technical prowess. At its core lies a critical capability: generating training data at scale. Historically, researchers have relied on manual human annotation to label images and videos for AI model training. SAM 3 dramatically accelerates this process while maintaining near-human accuracy. This is why Citizens JPM issued a $900 price target on Meta shares on Nov. 24—a call implying 36% upside from Meta’s Dec. 4 close—specifically citing SAM 3’s annotation efficiency as a key catalyst.

From Data Generation to Revenue Growth

The practical implications ripple across Meta’s entire business ecosystem. Consider Meta’s core advertising engine: Instagram and Facebook generate billions of short-form videos daily. By deploying SAM 3 to analyze and extract training data from this video library, Meta can significantly enhance its content and advertising recommendation algorithms. Better recommendations drive higher user engagement, which directly translates to increased ad value and revenue.

Beyond recommendation systems, SAM 3 powers immediate user-facing applications. Meta’s Edits, Instagram’s video creation suite, will soon integrate SAM 3’s capabilities to accelerate the editing process. Faster content creation strengthens network effects—more content attracts more users, more users inspire more creators, creating a virtuous cycle that locks both audiences and creators into Meta’s platform.

The technology also enhances Meta’s Advantage+ Creative suite, the AI-powered tool helping marketers generate visual advertisements. More sophisticated visual generation means more compelling ads and better targeting, amplifying the platform’s advertising value proposition.

Broader Implications for Meta’s AI Strategy

SAM 3 signals something more profound: Meta possesses world-class AI research capabilities. The model’s technical excellence rivals anything in the industry, offering investors concrete evidence that Meta’s AI investments aren’t hype.

The application potential extends beyond ads. Meta’s augmented reality glasses could leverage SAM 3’s object detection to create seamless overlays or quickly identify misplaced items. The company could also use SAM 3-generated data to further improve its general-purpose LLaMa models, creating a synergistic effect where each AI advance strengthens the entire ecosystem.

This interconnected strategy—where one breakthrough enables progress across advertising, content creation, AR, and foundation models—demonstrates the sophistication of Meta’s AI roadmap. For investors betting on Meta’s artificial intelligence moment, SAM 3 provides tangible proof that the company’s long-term AI strategy isn’t just theoretical.