The Secret to Picking AI Winners (Part 2)
We give you three rules, four buckets and 11 stocks for Wealth Builders ...
Editor’s Note: This is a follow up to Part 1 of the Quarterly Roundtable for SPC Premium members.
In the Fall of 1983, my roommate David (“Sparky” to his friends) and I were soon-to-graduate seniors completing our last few classes at Penn State.
I was studying journalism and (though I didn’t know it, yet), I’d soon start my newspaper career at a fine weekly back in my hometown in Northern Maryland. Sparky was completing his computer science degree — embarking on a computer career that continues today.
Returning for that half a year to scoop up those last few credits gave us a bit of freedom in the courses we chose. I added an American Studies class I’d wanted to take. And Sparky signed up for a course that PSU had just added to its computer-science curriculum.
A course on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“Yeah, they added an AI class in the fall of 1983,” Sparky told me during a recent “catch-up” call. “It was mostly theoretical: The Turing Test; stories about how some early-learning programs were failing badly … there was [one] where they were trying to get a Russian-language-interpreter program; they put in ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’ and got back ‘the alcohol is fine, but the meat is rotten.’ But mostly it was: ‘How would you know if a program became self-aware? Would it be understandable – or alien?’”
Forty years have passed since then, and millions of folks are hearing about AI for the first time. And millions of investors are worrying about how to best make money.
It’s a new innovation. But an old pattern. As we told you folks in Part I of this report, we can draw lessons from two earlier innovation-driven “paradigm shifts” — the PC Boom that started in the early 1980s and the Internet Revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s.