We recently compiled a list of the 10 Biggest AI Stories and Ratings Updates You Should Not Miss This Week. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) stands against the other AI stories.
Are Growing Patents in AI from China a Threat to the US?
China and the United States continue to compete against each other as the AI boom continues to reign in the tech industry. On July 2, Reuters reported that China plans to develop 50 new national and industrial standards for artificial intelligence by 2026. The country aims to standardize systems in the artificial intelligence sector by providing thorough guidelines to companies and budding startups. Furthermore, on July 3, Reuters reported that China filed six times more patents than the United States for inventions in AI like chatbots. On a global scale, more than 50,000 patent applications were filed in the past decade, a quarter of which were filed in 2023 alone. China filed 38,000 generative AI applications between 2014 and 2023, while the United States only filed slightly over 6,200 applications during the same period. Of the total applications, ByteDance, Alibaba Group, and Microsoft filed the largest number of applications. The report added that Chinese patent applications covered a wider range of sectors such as autonomous driving, publishing, and document management. South Korea, Japan, and India were ranked third, fourth, and fifth with the highest number of patent applications.
The United States, on the other hand, has reportedly accumulated $55.6 billion in venture capital funding in the second quarter of 2024, the highest quarterly total in two years. On July 3, Reuters reported that the surge in venture capital funding is driven by developments in artificial intelligence. Such is a 47% increase from the $37.8 billion raised by startups in the first quarter of 2024. Significant investments include $6 billion by Elon Musk’s xAI and $1.1 billion raised by CoreWeave. Previously, venture capital funding took a hit, reporting $35.4 billion in the second quarter of 2023 amid high interest rates and sluggish economic growth. While venture capital and investment in AI are increasing, the IPO market remains sluggish.
OpenAI & Anthropic: A Comparative Analysis
While the threat of Chinese innovations looms over the United States, startups in the country are disrupting the industry with key innovations. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is a leading artificial intelligence company based in the United States. In February this year, OpenAI closed a deal with venture capital firm Thrive Capital, allowing it to buy some of its shares in a tender offer, bringing its total valuation to $80 billion. This is a threefold increase in its value from a few months ago in 2023.
On June 10, OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership to integrate ChatGPT into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Users will now be able to access ChatGPT’s capabilities on all these devices without having to switch tools. Siri will also be able to reach ChatGPT when a user asks a question and will present them with an answer directly from the chatbot. ChatGPT will be integrated into Apple’s writing tools, allowing users to create content when required. The development ensures that user security remains intact. Requests are not stored by OpenAI and IP addresses remain obscured. Users may connect to their ChatGPT account, allowing them to choose their data preferences. The integration will be executed later this year and can be accessed for free without having to create an account.
In another update, Apple is reportedly positioned to join OpenAI’s board. On July 2, Reuters reported that Apple is set to get an observer role on OpenAI’s board, part of the agreement made by the two entities a month ago. Phill Schiller, head of Apple App Store and former marketing chief, was selected for this position. The board agreement will take effect later this year. As of yet, Schiller has not attended any meetings.
Anthropic, OpenAI’s direct competitor, is an artificial intelligence startup founded in 2021. The company is led by Dario and Daniela Amodei as CEO and president. The safety and research company is popular for its safety-oriented language models that produce reliable interpretable, and steerable AI systems. On March 27, CNBC reported that Amazon invested an additional $2.75 billion in the startup, bringing its total investment to $4 billion. Anthropic’s valuation at that time was $18.4 billion and closed five different funding rounds worth $7.3 billion in the past year. Amazon will remain a minority stakeholder in the company. Last year, Alphabet’s Google announced an investment worth $2 billion into Anthropic adding to its $550 million funding from earlier.
Claude is the company’s AI platform able to conduct advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation, and multilingual processing. Anthropic recently launched Claude 3.5 Sonner, its first release from the Claude 3.5 family. Claude 2.5 Sonnet has set a new benchmark for graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate-level knowledge, and coding proficiency. The new AI platform operates at twice the speed of Clause Opus. Based on an internal evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet was able to solve 64% of problems. On the contrary, Claude Opus was able to solve only 38% of problems. On July 2, Anthropic announced the launch of a new initiative for a robust third-party evaluation ecosystem. The new initiative will be able to fund evaluations developed by third-party organizations to measure advanced features in AI models. The company strongly believes that the initiative will enhance AI safety level assessments, improve safety metrics, and develop infrastructure and tools for evaluations. The safety level assessments will encompass cybersecurity, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear risks, model autonomy, national security risks, and social manipulation.
A lot is going on in the AI space and several companies have emerged as interesting AI stories. We have compiled a list of the most interesting AI stories on Wall Street by studying many reports and publications and watching interviews. The list is sorted in ascending order of hedge fund sentiment, which was sourced from Insider Monkey’s proprietary database that tracks over 900 elite money managers.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).
A customer entering an internet retail store, illustrating the convenience of online shopping.
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 302
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) has become one of the best AI stories on Wall Street. The company is poised for significant growth in AI, thanks to its generative AI tools in Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as Amazon Q, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker. In March, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) invested an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence safety and research company, bringing its total investment to $4 billion. The company is leveraging Anthropic’s models and just launched the Claude 3.5 Sonnet to Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic’s most powerful model yet. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is twice as efficient as Claude 3 Opus and is one-fifth of its price. The new AI can perform extremely complex tasks and is well-equipped with skills in producing high-quality and authentic creative content, understanding data and contextual relationships, and developing advanced codes with sophisticated reasoning.
Amazon is also making in-house AI chips such as the AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia for deep learning training of more than 100 billion parameter models. The company is on its way to becoming an AI powerhouse. AWS logged $25 billion in revenue, up 17% year-over-year. In 2023, the company spent $48.4 billion in capital expenditure. to advance its generative AI and non-generative AI workloads. As per a recent update, Amazon plans to spend more than $100 billion to fund its projects in artificial intelligence and data centers over the next decade.
Maxim Group’s managing director and senior consumer internet analyst Tom Forte talked about Amazon’s AI position in a recent interview on Yahoo Finance. Forte believes Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is well positioned to exploit artificial intelligence at the cloud computing and fulfillment center level, especially compared to tech giants like Apple. The company is making advancements in AWS while also employing techniques to automate its operations, which is a positive sign for investors.
Overall, Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) was held by 302 hedge funds at the close of Q1 2024 with total stakes amounting to $60.37 billion. Of those, Ken Fisher’s Fisher Asset Management was the highest stakeholder with a position of $7.68 billion.
On July 1, Needham reiterated a buy rating on the stock and maintained its price target of $205. Analysts’ median price target of $220 represents an upside of 11% from current levels.
Lakehouse Capital is also bullish on the stock. Here are some comments about AMZN from its Q1 2024 investor letter:
“Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) delivered an impressive quarterly result that also came in well ahead of analyst expectations. Net sales increased 13% year-on-year to $143.3 billion and operating profits increased 219% year-on-year to $15.3 billion (vs the high end of guidance at $12.0 billion). As has been the case for several quarters now, the highlight of the result was the significant improvement in profitability metrics, as management continues to drive cost efficiencies across its retail operations and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon delivered to Prime members at its fastest speeds ever. In March, across the top 60 largest U.S. metro areas, nearly 60% of Prime member orders arrived the same or next day, and in London, Tokyo, and Toronto, 3 out of 4 items were delivered the same or next day. Bigger picture, we continue to believe that the market underestimates the length of the runway ahead in the core retail business (note that e-commerce sales in the U.S. still only make up 15% of total retail sales) and that there is still significant margin expansion ahead as scale and efficiency benefits continue to come through.”
Overall AMZN ranks 1st on our list of the biggest AI stories right now. You can visit 10 Biggest AI Stories and Ratings Updates You Should Not Miss This Week to see the other AI stories that are on hedge funds’ radar. While we acknowledge the potential of AMZN as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMZN but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.