We recently compiled a list of the 11 Trending AI Stocks on Latest News and Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) stands against the other trending AI stocks.
China’s Growing Influence in the AI Race
The rise of Chinese open-source AI models highlights their growing influence in the global AI landscape, challenging traditional proprietary systems. Their accessibility and competitive capabilities signal a shift in the balance of AI innovation. On December 17, CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal reported that Chinese AI models are advancing rapidly, with several matching or exceeding the performance of U.S. models despite chip restrictions imposed by Washington.
Open-source models, referred to as “open weight,” are key to this growth. These models, such as Deepseek and Alibaba’s QN, are highly popular on platforms like Hugging Face, allowing developers worldwide to freely access and build applications without strict licensing. The strategy enables Chinese companies to distribute their technology widely and challenge proprietary systems from firms like OpenAI, which rely on closed ecosystems to monetize their models. The growing adoption and strong capabilities of Chinese large language models present a significant challenge to U.S. dominance in the AI sector.
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OpenAI’s o3 Surpasses Milestones, Challenging Global AI Competitors
While China is making significant moves in AI, US-based companies are also making strides. OpenAI concluded its 12-day “shipmas” event by unveiling o3, a new reasoning model and successor to o1, along with o3-mini, a smaller version tailored for specific tasks. CEO Sam Altman highlighted the advanced capabilities, including exceptional performance in coding, mathematics, and scientific problem-solving.
The o3 model achieved a groundbreaking 87.5% on the ARC-AGI benchmark, prompting plans to develop a more challenging evaluation. The score shows the model’s ability to perform well on tasks that require learning and adapting to new challenges. ARC-AGI is a benchmark used to evaluate how well an AI can acquire new skills beyond its training data. This high score suggests that o3 is advancing toward more general intelligence capabilities. With a strong focus on safety testing and future enhancements, o3 represents a major step forward for U.S.-based AI development.
OpenAI’s decision to skip naming the model o2 is linked to trademark concerns with a UK telecom company. While o3 is not yet broadly available, safety researchers can preview o3-mini now, with general availability expected in early 2025.
For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. We listed the stocks in ascending order of their hedge fund sentiment taken from Insider Monkey’s database of 900 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).
A development team working together to create the next version of Windows.
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 279
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) incorporates AI across its cloud services, productivity tools, and business solutions to improve automation, security, and user experience. Its AI initiatives include advanced cloud offerings, AI-driven business applications, and innovative language processing and computing technologies.
Reuters reported on December 23 that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is integrating internal and third-party AI models into Microsoft 365 Copilot to reduce reliance on OpenAI’s technology and lower operational costs, sources revealed. While OpenAI remains a key partner, Microsoft is customizing OpenAI’s models and training its own smaller models, such as Phi-4, to improve cost efficiency and performance. This approach aligns with similar shifts in other Microsoft services like GitHub and its consumer chatbot Copilot. Though adoption has faced challenges, analysts predict over 10 million paid users by year-end, with 70% of Fortune 500 companies already utilizing 365 Copilot.
Overall, MSFT ranks 1st on our list of trending AI stocks on latest news and ratings. While we acknowledge the potential of MSFT 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 time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than MSFT 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.
