We recently published a list of 10 AI Stocks to Watch on Latest News and Analyst Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) stands against other AI stocks to watch on latest news and analyst ratings.

AI discussion boards online are buzzing with a new development where tech experts are pointing to a possible plateauing of performance in artificial intelligence applications.

CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa in a latest program quoted tech investor Ben Horowitz, who said in a recent podcast that he’s not seeing performance improvement despite increasing GPUs.

“We’re increasing GPUs at the same rate, but we’re not getting the intelligence improvements at all out of it.”

OpenAI is reportedly facing similar problems with its upcoming AI model.

“The Information reports that the quality increase in OpenAI’s upcoming advanced model, Orion, is smaller than the jump seen between the last two flagship models, GPT-3 and GPT-4. In other words, generational advancements may have peaked as the models are essentially running out of data to train on,” Bosa said.

While the next jump in AI performance is far away in the future, the possibilities this technology has unlocked based on the existing data and resources are keeping investors and Wall Street analysts busy.

READ ALSO: Jim Cramer’s Latest Lightning Round: 11 Stocks to Watch and Jim Cramer on AMD and Other Stocks.

In this article we take a look at top AI stocks trending on the back of latest news and analyst ratings. With each stock we have mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. 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).

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 184

UBS analyst David Vogt said in a recent note that Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) store’s revenue growth in October was solid. However, he remains cautious amid challenging comps and expectations that iPhone sell-throughs won’t improve as of December.

“However, we remain cautious as the rest of the December quarter faces similarly challenging comps in the ~13% range, while iPhone sell-through is unlikely to accelerate, typically a source of incremental App Store demand.”

Vogt, who has a Neutral rating and a $236 price target on Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL), added that it is “too early” to attribute the strength to Apple Intelligence, given that iOS 18.1 was released on October 28, but noted the growth is a “positive data point” compared to Apple’s guidance for its Services segment.

Polen Focus Growth Strategy stated the following regarding Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) in its Q3 2024 investor letter:

The largest relative detractors during the quarter were Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Airbnb, and Tesla (not owned). We added a new position in Apple during the period, which we discuss further in the following section. While Apple is a roughly average-sized position in Focus Growth, it is the largest holding in the Russell 1000 Growth Index, at over 12%, and the stock’s outperformance in the quarter weighed on relative results.

In the third quarter, we purchased new positions in Apple. We owned Apple from early 2009 through late 2016, a period characterized by the massive iPhone-driven growth phase propelling the company’s revenue and earnings to levels almost unseen previously. We moved on from the position in 2016 as we felt Apple had nearly fully penetrated the high end of the smartphone market, which by and large proved correct. Revenue growth has since compounded in the mid-to-high single digits, with earnings growth modestly higher, driven by heavy share buybacks. In the last two years, the company’s revenue and earnings growth has slowed to essentially 0%.

Apple can now upgrade Siri to the true helpful digital assistance consumers hoped it would be all along. Not to mention, the new operating system brings useful new features to not only Apple apps and services but also seamlessly across third-party apps. We believe this means a multi-year upgrade cycle is coming for iPhones that will be unveiled later in 2024 and into 2025. The elongation of the iPhone replacement cycle over the last few years is likely to stop or even reverse, pulling forward stronger revenue, earnings, and free cashflow growth for Apple over the next few years. We expect this to not only accelerate iPhone volume growth but also likely a product mix shifting to higher-priced, higher-margin iPhones. We also expect the AI functionality to be more impactful with bigger screens, processing, and memory. With consumer budgets getting tighter, we feel the new Apple phones with GenAI functionality will become a top priority for consumers versus other areas of spend, which we expect could give a safety-like quality to the acceleration. While the company’s valuation at just under 30x forward earnings is not cheap, we feel the earnings acceleration will allow Apple to generate at least double-digit returns (possibly even mid-teens) over the next few years, earning its place in our Focus Growth Portfolio.”

Overall, AAPL ranks 3rd on our list of AI stocks to watch on latest news and analyst ratings. While we acknowledge the potential of AAPL, our conviction lies in the belief that under the radar AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AAPL 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.