Cohu, Inc. (COHU) to Acquire Tignis, Expanding into $2.6 Billion Semiconductor Process Control Market

We recently compiled a list of the Top 12 AI Stock News and Ratings Dominating Wall Street. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Cohu, Inc. (NASDAQ:COHU) stands against the other AI stocks.

There is a growing concern in Silicon Valley that the progress around artificial intelligence is slowly “losing steam”. CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa explores whether AI progress is slowing, and what it means for the industry. Early signs of struggle are bubbling up in major tech names. As highlighted by Bosa, the first sign of things slowing down has been a lack of progression between models. OpenAI has led the pack in AI advancements, with each of the new models of ChatGPT exponentially better than the last.

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Unfortunately, the same can’t be said about today. OpenAI’s highly anticipated model Orion was expected to be a ground-breaking system bringing us closer to AGI. However, the initial vision is being scaled back.

“While Orion’s performance ended up exceeding that of prior models, the increase in quality was far smaller compared with the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4, the last two flagship models the company released, according to some OpenAI employees who have used or tested Orion”.

-The Information

The same roadblocks have been happening to other AI models, such as that by Anthropic. Just like OpenAI, Anthropic is also witnessing a timetable slip for the release of its long-awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus.

“The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit. It’s become clear that ‘different training approaches’ may be needed to make AI models work really well on a variety of tasks.”

-Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, to Bloomberg.

Even some of the big tech giants aren’t enthusiastic about the progress AI has been making. Speaking during the New York Times annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Sundar Pichai stated how generative AI won’t be changing lives in 2025— at least, not more than it already has.

“I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at [2025], the low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper … You’re definitely going to need deeper breakthroughs as we get to the next stage”.

– Sundar Pichai

However, if progress is plateauing, it has to do with scaling laws. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei states that the scaling laws are a misnomer. He emphasizes that while these patterns have historically guided AI development—suggesting that increasing data and computational power leads to improved AI capabilities—they are not guaranteed to continue indefinitely.

As such, AI companies have been turning to synthetic AI, i.e. data generated artificially. The Information reports that Orion was produced based on synthetic data. However, the problem has been that low-quality data, in turn, leads to low-quality performance. As such, with leading tech companies poised to unveil new models over the next eighteen months, their pace of progress—or lack thereof—has the potential to dramatically redefine the dynamics of the competition.

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.

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A robotic arm placing a semiconductor chip on a test contactor.

Cohu, Inc. (NASDAQ:COHU)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 16

Cohu, Inc. (NASDAQ:COHU) is a global technology leader that provides semiconductor test equipment and services to the semiconductor industry. On December 16, the company announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Tignis, Inc., a provider of AI-powered process control solutions and analytics-based monitoring software. Cohu’s strategic acquisition aims to target the estimated $2.6 billion semiconductor process control market through Tignis’ PAICe Monitor and PAICe Maker solutions. Leveraging AI, machine learning, and data science, the PAICe Monitor and PAICe Maker solutions provide advanced predictive and prescriptive automation solutions for semiconductor manufacturing. Cohu also expects the acquisition to deepen its expertise in data science and add advanced analytics to its DI-Core software.

“We look forward to the very talented Tignis team joining the Cohu family. This acquisition represents a significant opportunity to accelerate our growth in semiconductor manufacturing, broaden our product portfolio, and deepen our customer presence. Together, our combined expertise and complementary capabilities will drive artificial intelligence process predictability, empowering semiconductor manufacturers to achieve higher yield, improved quality, and greater productivity.”

-Cohu President and CEO Luis Müller.

Overall COHU ranks 7th on our list of the AI stocks that are dominating Wall Street. While we acknowledge the potential of COHU as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some 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 COHU 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.