Investing in Artificial Intelligence (AI)

[Garpal Gumnut]

mind you their plan is working very well in the UK ( their alleged base )

You may ask what colour were the carrots that I bought in the supermarket last Friday.

The carrots that I bought in the supermarket last Friday were carrot coloured.

gg

 

[divs4ever]

You may ask what colour were the carrots that I bought in the supermarket last Friday.

The carrots that I bought in the supermarket last Friday were carrot coloured.

gg

well the orange ones used to be carrots and the whitish ones turnips , but in this 'rainbow world ' they might be purple next week

 

[divs4ever]

i'll stick to energy suppliers coal gas , oil and copper plays for AI , and industrial sheds/data centers for the next level exposure along with telcos so the databases can update themselves

 

[mullokintyre]

It seems that one fund manager sees a bubble in AI.
From MSN

Mick

 

[mullokintyre]

Zerohedge sees another sign that perhaps the bubble in Ai may be starting to lose a little air.

Shares of server-maker Super Micro Computer, which have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the AI euphoria over the past two years as it emerged as a proxy for AI demand (and server installs), soared as much as 16% before crashing more than 10%, after the company reported Q2 revenue and profit that missed estimates, but it was the company's plunging profit margins that which outweighed the company's ecstatic sales outlook that was billions above Wall Street projections as well as the 10-1 reverse stock split announcement.

For Q2, SMCI reported revenues of $5.31 billion, which missed the average estimate of $5.32 billion; while Adjusted EPS dropped to $6.25, well short of Super Micro’s own previous forecast and the $8.25 average analyst estimate.
But what truly spooked Wall Street was the incineration in margin which collapsed 580bps YoY (and 430bps QoQ) to just 11.3%, amid a fierce price cutting war with competitors such as Dell and Hewlett Packard.



Also, the $635 million in cash burn - the 3rd straight quarter of negative cash from operations - did not help.



While the company tried to blame the collapse in margins on "customer and product mix and investments in Talent and Research & Development, Wall Street did not buy it, and in fact it sold it aggressively, sending the stock collapsing to the lowest level of the year.

mick

 

[mullokintyre]

A further datapoint on the meme that the AI bubble deflation has begun.
From Extreme Tech
Intel announced that its third gen Gaudi chip will be a third the price of its competitors from NVIDIA.
A price war in AI chips, just what the doctor ordered.
Mick

 

[Dona Ferentes]

The investment environment for AI is interesting atm.

from around the traps
.

THE NEXT BIG THING IS...​

By Ed D'Agostino | October 22, 2024

Investors are always on the lookout for the next big thing. The next technology that will bring about an economic evolution. The next trillion-dollar industry (or company). The next shiny new investment that will propel their portfolios upward.

Investing in the next big thing isn’t easy. Look at the tech bubble of the late 1990s, followed by the crash of 2000. Venture capitalist Brad Gerstner, in a great interview with Meb Faber, noted that even if you knew the internet would be the next big thing, and even if you knew that search would be at the core of the internet, you probably wouldn’t have made money investing in early internet stocks. Most went to zero.

In the ‘90s, we had multiple search engines. I was fond of Ask Jeeves. Some of you won’t know what that is since it no longer exists. Jeeves, along with AltaVista, Infoseek, Lycos, Magellan, and several others are either gone or irrelevant today. Gerstner also pointed out that if you had the foresight (or luck) to invest in Google at its IPO and then held on, you would have hit the motherload. I say “luck” because that’s what it would have taken. Few investors can say they saw Google as the single best bet on the internet, and even fewer held on as the stock’s value oscillated on its way to becoming a $2 trillion market cap business.

Despite the challenges of anticipating the next big thing, let alone successfully investing in it, I can’t help myself. I’m an investor, but I have a speculative side.
I think quantum computing is the next big thing.

As we unlock the secrets of quantum, change will accelerate. The speed at which a quantum computer will operate, and the level of complexity a quantum system will be able to manipulate, are mind-boggling.

What’s the difference between quantum computing and today’s computers? Mainly the way it computes. Classical computers use bits, while quantum computers use qubits. IBM sums it up this way:

"A classical bit can only exist in either a 0 position or a 1 position. Qubits, however, can also occupy a third state known as a superposition. A superposition represents 0, 1, and all the positions in between taken at once, for a total of three separate positions."

I started my quantum research by watching videos (no surprise, I suppose). This one with CUNY professor Dr. Michio Kaku is a great primer. If you like Kaku’s style and want to go deeper, check out his book, Quantum Supremacy. I had to take the book one chapter at a time. This is heady stuff, even at the layman’s level...

The risks of investing in a fledgling industry are significant. Some of the risks I see with quantum include:

• Qubits are susceptible to errors, making scaling difficult.
• There are multiple approaches to working with qubits. Some involve operating at near absolute zero temperatures, lasers, and isolating photons or atoms.
• The cost to scale a quantum computer is proving to be enormously expensive, potentially eliminating smaller players in the space.
• Google is one of the big companies making progress in quantum computing. Will the Federal Trade Commission break it up? If so, will the entity that ends up with Google’s quantum technology have the capital to continue investing in the technology?

Quantum computing as an investment is an example of Gartner’s hype cycle at work, and we are in its early stages.

​

All of this to say, investing in quantum today is very much a speculation...