JPMorgan Reiterates Overweight on Apple Inc. (AAPL), Predicts AI-Driven Growth with iPhone 17 Launch

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 Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) 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.

READ ALSO: 10 AI Stocks Taking Wall Street by Storm and Top 10 AI Stocks on Latest News and Analyst Ratings

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.

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).

Here is Why Warren Buffett Sold AAPL Stock

A wide view of an Apple store, showing the range of products the company offers.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 158

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is a technology company that makes personal computers, mobile devices, and software. Its recent innovation is Apple Intelligence, the company’s AI-driven personal system. One of the biggest analyst calls issued on Monday, December 16, was for Apple Inc. JPMorgan reiterated its “Overweight” rating on the stock with a price target of $265.00. The stock surged in the second half of the year, with the integration of AI with the iPhone and other devices driving it upward. Some analysts, however, may not agree considering the little boost to sales. According to the JP Morgan analyst, the boost is anticipated to come through with the expected launch of the iPhone 17 next year. In his view, it would drive iPhone sales from 230 million units in Apple’s fiscal 2025 year to 251 million in fiscal 2026.

Overall, AAPL ranks 1st on our list of the AI stocks that are dominating Wall Street. While we acknowledge the potential of AAPL 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 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.