Where are AI investments coming from?
Two approaches were taken when starting to answer this question about AI investments. First, I started to think about what companies were really all in on machine learning and artificial intelligence. That gave me a good look at where the corporate side investment is being targeted. Second, I started to dig into the adventurous and often difficult to understand world of venture capital.
Pretty much everywhere you look online people are recommending what stocks benefit from artificial intelligence or machine learning investment.[1] It's done at a sector level and based on specific companies. You will see a list of companies that are not all that surprising. It would include the likes of IBM, Qualcomm, Taiwan Semiconductor, NVIDIA, Intel, Micron, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. Take a step back right now and think about that list of companies that got looped into beneficiaries of AI investments. It’s really a solid list of technology companies right? The bigger technology companies are using AI/ML use cases to drive things forward and are receiving recognition in the market for that type of effort. A lot of academic groups are working on things and you can see modern versions of think tanks popping up all over the place. The interesting part of all of that is how many of those academics go in and out of the corporate world. Outside of that revolving door you see a large number of acquisitions in the AI/ML world where those big companies listed above are eating up technology and talent within the market.
Outside of all of those thoughts about companies we need to take a look at the world of venture capital investing. I found a bunch of lists about who is investing in AI right now.[2] If you have been following venture capital throughout the last decade, then the names of the companies who are investing in AI/ML should not be surprising. A lot of these investors are hoping to invest in something that will be acquired or grow into a glorious mythical unicorn. Even some companies that have no hope of actually gaining market share get acquired for machine learning talent and intellectual property. Sometimes the accumulation of patents is a business play and that is probably a topic I should add to my writing schedule.[3] The good folks over at Forbes actually started to question if all the investment was excessive.[4] Along the way of doing some research on this one I ran into one article from McKinsey Quarterly that caught my attention it was about, “A machine-learning approach to venture capital.”[5] It was an interesting read and you might enjoy it.
Links and thoughts:
This week you get a bonus episode of Machine Learning Street Talk, “OpenAI Codex (Bonus Episode)”
During the course of writing this post I watched “The WAN Show” with Linus and Luke
You can check out the latest AI show from Microsoft Developer with Seth, “AI Show Live - Episode 29 - I wanna 🤘🏽 Rock (Paper, Scissors) with Seth”
Make sure to check out Yannic this week… “[ML News] Blind Chess AI Competition | Graph NNs for traffic | AI gift suggestions”
Top 5 Tweets of the week:
Footnotes:
[1] So many examples exist of investment recommendations based on AI/ML, but I thought it would be fun to provide one from Yahoo! https://www.yahoo.com/now/10-best-machine-learning-stocks-164924452.html
[2] https://growthlist.co/blog/ai-vc
[3] You will be able to read about “Who is acquiring machine learning patents?” during week 55 of “The Lindahl Letter.”
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 34: Where are the main AI Labs? Google Brain, DeepMind, OpenAI
Week 35: Explainability in modern ML
Week 36: AIOps/MLOps: Consumption of AI Services vs. operations
Week 37: Reverse engineering GPT-2 or GPT-3
Week 38: Do most ML projects fail?
I’ll try to keep the what’s next list forward looking with at least five weeks of posts in planning or review. If you enjoyed reading this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend.