Good morning! While sipping my morning coffee, I read an article on Yle’s website about smart bodysuits for babies. It’s absolutely wonderful that such research is being done and funded. Actual commercial products might still be further in the future, but what incredible potential: new parents of every baby would probably want such a smart bodysuit… not to mention applications for pets. (Another thing is how many false positive cases this could lead to…)
Inspired by the news about baby bodysuits, I thought I’d ask if there are any AI companies or companies with significant AI-related product development on the Helsinki Stock Exchange? Part of my investment plan is to re-invest funds from funds acquired a few years ago into AI funds and AI companies. So far, AI investments are limited to 3M shares (due to 3M’s AI sector-related product development and business) and the AI-specialized fund Smith & Williamson AI fund (see attachment for companies within it).
I chose the fund based on it having a stake in Ocado, which is better known as a grocery home delivery company. In fact, Ocado is an AI company because they have strongly developed robotics and automation, for example, in their warehouses. I have been using Ocado myself for ten years (I live in Britain) and a few years ago one of the drivers hinted that Ocado shares would be worth buying precisely because of its robotics. Ocado’s business has been loss-making for years, even though its share price development has been quite remarkable. Precisely because of that negative cash flow, I wouldn’t necessarily dare to buy it directly into my portfolio, but since it’s part of a fund, I trust that the portfolio managers will know how to exit it in time if future forecasts weaken.
(Edit: added link to Yle news. Administration may remove the fund attachment if not allowed. I didn’t notice that the rules prohibited this, and this is not an investment recommendation.)
Alphabet is probably the AI giant on this planet, which is why it’s in my portfolio. In China, both Alibaba and Tencent also have stakes in various AI companies, and Alibaba is in my portfolio.
Some other interesting names in the AI field could be a few other American giants:
Facebook aims to increasingly utilize AI in targeting ads / bringing interesting content to users’ feeds. → more clicks / more valuable clicks (if they lead to purchases for the advertiser)
Amazon invests heavily in, for example, Alexa → aims to tie users even more strongly into its own ecosystem with its “home assistant” product. Amazon is also a significant player in digital advertising → better targeted advertising potentially brings more ad revenue on their platform.
NVIDIA makes a lot of hardware/developer tools used to design / run AI solutions. NVIDIA is trying hard to develop its own ecosystem, similar to other tech giants. Sales to data centers are significant, which is already a strongly growing business in itself.
Among the subcategories of AI, self-driving cars are one major area of investment → returns are still quite far off, and competitors are sure to emerge. Tesla & Alphabet probably have the muscle for their own solutions.
The third pillar as an investment case is traditional GPU sales for gaming.
Temporarily, crypto mining was also a source of revenue, but its best edge seems to be gone (for now).
Last year, there was talk about Google’s quantum computer, and a study on it was briefly published but then quickly withdrawn… you could probably find it…by googling
I kept wondering what kind of interests were involved in that, and who ordered the study to be removed… the government?
Somehow, my gut feeling is that Alphabet is head and shoulders above the rest, but it hasn’t been told to the general public…
Nice to see some discussion on this topic. I’ll add some fuel to the fire with an interesting idea I heard from an investment banker acquaintance on a ski lift during a holiday week. (I’ll try to present it in a way that offends no one, and I hope the comments stay within good taste.)
So, we were discussing investments in general, and I asked him where he thought AI was headed / interesting companies in that field. He said he would be interested in investing in AI companies that bring sex robots to the market for both women and men. His reasoning was that online pornography drove the development of the internet, and this is such a primal need that a company able to productize a robot in this area will be among the winners. I wouldn’t have thought of such a product as an AI investment myself, but you learn something new every day.
Let’s revive this thread. AI and machine learning are the hottest topics in technology right now. They deserve more attention on the forum.
Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, NVIDIA, Alibaba, Tencent are mentioned. They are very familiar. And probably will continue to be. However, I’m looking for new players. Ocado, mentioned by @Moops, has risen 68% since February 13th.
Thanks for the interesting start and links. AI and machine learning are definitely enablers of major breakthroughs in the future.
The first things that come to mind are these big giants: GOOGL, Microsoft, and Amazon. Wouldn’t the rapid utilization of large amounts of data require the capacity offered by cloud services? In that case, gigantic datasets are stored in the cloud, and calculations can be performed on them using, for example, Microsoft Azure’s machine learning software.
Is there anyone working in the field on this forum? It would be interesting to hear the views of professionals in the industry.
I somehow think that 5G and the real-time collection of large amounts of data combined with AI algorithms will explode the bank for those companies that can combine these things.
{“content”:“Good thread, thanks!\n\nAs someone in the industry, there’s a lot of talk about AI and ML, but not much is being done yet – still. I agree with what’s been mentioned in the thread: Google, Microsoft, Amazon are the top names.\n\nGoogle: In addition to the obvious, they are starting to compete with Azure and AWS with Google Cloud, aiming to create low-code solutions. (One of the first is Data Studio, analytics)\n\nMicrosoft: Huge, expensive investments in Azure in recent years. They are starting to pay off in euros and market share. I’d be happy to write more about this when I have more time.\n\nAmazon: AWS continues its winning streak but is gaining alongside Google and Azure.\n\nIn addition to those already mentioned in the thread:\n- eBay: Strong in-house expertise with large-scale projects. I don’t see it as impossible that, like Google and Amazon, something sellable/utilizable externally could emerge. Alibaba (at least in Asia?) is already doing this.\n- Adobe: Their portfolio includes much more, but analytics and AI have gained prominence in recent years. However, they are mainly focused on marketing.\n\nOf those mentioned, I would only drop Alteryx. Unless they come up with something revolutionary, their heyday was 3-5 years ago. Since then, they have gained many open-source competitors, and the difference in licensing fees can be huge.\n\nI believe we will see strong up-and-comers from unlisted companies that are being bought out by the big players.”,“target_locale”:“en”}
Inspired by the revival of the thread, I checked how my Smith & Williamson AI fund has been performing. I must say, it’s doing incredibly well! I started buying on November 11, 2019, at a price of 156.76p per share, and by July 2, 2020, the price was 209.69p. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to buy more in March when the price dipped to around 139.20p.
At the end of May 2020, the top 10 holdings were in these companies:
Alphabet ‘A’ 5.7%
Ocado 4.1%
Microsoft 3.4%
L3Harris Technologies 3.3%
MercadoLibre 3.0%
Keyence 2.9%
Pinduoduo 2.9%
Advantest 2.8%
SAP 2.8%
Tesla 2.7%
In November 2019, when I made the investment decision, the top 10 holdings were:
Alphabet ‘A’ 6.4%
TransUnion 3.9%
Microsoft 3.4%
Ocado 3.4%
Alibaba 3.1%
L3Harris Technologies 3.1%
Advantest 2.9%
SAP 2.8%
Nvidia 2.8%
Intuitive Surgical 2.8%
This is an active fund, and it appears that the fund made purchases during the corona dip. Tesla has risen into the top 10 holdings, as has MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre is Latin America’s largest e-commerce and payment system. I think that for me, investing in AI is most sensible through an active fund like this. If bought individually, AI giants are so expensive that I would only be able to buy, for example, two Microsoft shares per month at Microsoft’s current share price of $206.
Hey! Do you have any information on those competitors? Can you quickly name any publicly traded companies? Is there, for example, one that stands “above the rest”? My portfolio includes Alteryx, and it has risen nicely by about 50% since early May.
The next level of AI seems to be on the hardware side, where for example, a camera sensor or a computer’s SoC chip is directly harnessed to use neural networks.
A security company based on utilizing AI for threat detection, etc. Startup-sized (?), at least it hasn’t broken into the market yet. The pilots have been in the field perhaps a bit too long from an investor’s perspective. I think there was a dedicated thread for this on the forum, so no more on that.
Excellent! I hope AI saves many from boring work. The other day I was listening to BBC Radio 4 and the interviewee was talking about how automation always increases and jobs decrease as a result of such economic transition periods. I didn’t manage to find the name of that particular guy, as I no longer remember when I heard the interview, but this FT article talks about the same thing.
This is a good point. Years ago, I already thought that restaurants could put a tablet on every table so that people could order food when they felt like it (by speaking), and wouldn’t have to wait for a waiter to come to the table. Waiters would then mainly be just dish movers. Even this job wouldn’t be very difficult to automate within the next couple of years. I see that robotics in service industries starts with breaking down large, obvious processes for humans into smaller and easier processes for robots. Later, Gen X robots can then integrate several processes into one continuum.
One would think that in Japan/Korea etc. there would already be robot waiters or otherwise quite automated eateries. Yo! Sushi’s sushi carousel is in a way one version of automated serving. By the way, there are interesting videos on the subject on YouTube. One of them made a good point that if a hamburger is fried and assembled by a robot, the customer can be sure that they are the only person who has touched their food. There’s a USP for a robot restaurant in the aftermath of the Corona era; a restaurant where those who fear the virus more would dare to go…
In Singapore, at Genkisushi, you just scanned a QR code with your phone to access the menu. From there, you tapped on your phone what you wanted to eat, and the food came on a conveyor belt directly to the right table. Extremely convenient.
