Artificial intelligence made waves this week with a Goldman Sachs report as well as at the Shoptalk marketing conference. With investors homing in on AI stocks, management at many companies continued to call out generative AI on earnings calls with Wall Street analysts.
AI Stocks: Goldman Sachs Report
In one development for AI stocks, Goldman Sachs released a deep-dive report. It focused on generative AI, startup OpenAI and the emergence of ChatGPT.
As software companies integrate generative AI tools into products, their customers will spend more on software, said Goldman Sachs. Also, generative AI will add an incremental $150 billion to the current global software market of $685 billion, the brokerage said.
Further, Goldman Sachs said generative AI could impact 300 million jobs globally, and spark a productivity boom. That boom could eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7% over a 10-year period, the brokerage said.
However, concern about the possible damage artificial intelligence could do to humanity persists. More than 1,000 technology industry leaders, researchers and others this week signed an open letter. It called for a moratorium on the development of the most powerful AI technologies.
Earnings Calls Tout Generative AI
Goldman Sachs also cited companies that mentioned generative AI the most on recent quarterly earnings calls. The top two were Microsoft and Shutterstock. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest investor.
Others included Globant, CSG Systems, VeriSign, Alteryx, DHI Group and eGain.
On its fourth-quarter earnings call Wednesday, Sprinklr mentioned generative AI eight times, putting it right behind MSFT stock and Shutterstock. Sprinklr earnings and revenue topped estimates.
Amid the buzz over AI stocks, Google hosted a cloud-computing summit. Chipmaker Nvidia was among the participants at the Google Data Cloud and AI summit.
Shoptalk Conference: Investors Beware
At the Shoptalk marketing conference, Alphabet's Google, Amazon.com and others touted their AI initiatives.
In a review of Shoptalk, Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said investors should be cautious. "It's amazing how many companies now claim generative AI capabilities," Sebastian said.
He added: "It will take some time to sort out the haves vs. have-nots, and we encourage investors to continue evaluating companies based on 'real' AI and data science."
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri in a report published today focused on computing power needed by AI. Arcuri said: "NVDA remains the market leader in AI hardware and is essentially viewed as the industry standard for AI compute in the data center."
He added: "NVDA has capitalized on its first mover advantage and is now deeply entrenched as the go-to provider of not just hardware, but also software solutions for AI development." NVDA stock belongs to the IBD Leaderboard.
Meanwhile, media coverage of generative AI has surged since startup OpenAI introduced its ChatGPT chatbot in November. OpenAI's ChatGPT is only one of many generative AI technologies that could roil a host of industries by creating text, images, video and computer programming code on their own.
Follow Reinhardt Krause on Twitter @reinhardtk_tech for updates on 5G wireless, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing.
