The Hackett Group, Inc. (HCKT) Strengthens AI Offerings with Acquisition of GenAI Firm LeewayHertz

We recently compiled a list of the 10 AI News Making Waves Today. In this article, we are going to take a look at where The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT) stands against the other AI stocks that are making waves today.

Is the AGI bubble about to burst? According to Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, it is to some extent. The crux of the matter is that, while essential for building more advanced systems, high-quality, human-made training data is lacking. Additionally, minor improvements to AI technologies such as ChatGPT are failing to justify the enormous costs associated with building and operating new models. That said, Bloomberg reports that three of the leading AI companies are now witnessing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models of artificial intelligence products.

READ ALSO: 10 AI Headlines Making Waves Today and 15 AI News You Must Read Today

It is reported that the upcoming iteration of Google’s Gemini software is falling short of internal expectations. Likewise, Anthropic has also been experiencing delays in releasing its highly anticipated Claude model, 3.5 Opus. Moreover, OpenAI’s Orion is reportedly not meeting its desired performance expectations. Although market commentary may indicate otherwise, a Google DeepMind spokesperson has noted that the company is “pleased with the progress we’re seeing on Gemini and we’ll share more when we’re ready”. On the other hand, Bloomberg reports that companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have declined to comment. In turn, Anthropic pointed out to a podcast featuring Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei.

“People call them scaling laws. That’s a misnomer,” he said on the podcast. “They’re not laws of the universe. They’re empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I’m not certain of that”.

According to Amodei, many factors may come in the way of reaching more powerful AI in the next few years, but companies who are optimistic about artificial intelligence will most likely find a way around them. As the race to develop more advanced AI continues, recent developments in the field highlight both the challenges and breakthroughs that are shaping its future.

Latest Events in AI

According to a report from Bloomberg, OpenAI is on its way to launch a new artificial intelligence agent codenamed “Operator”. The AI agent will be able to take actions on a person’s behalf, such as writing code or booking travel. The tool is reportedly released in January as a research preview.

In other news, a Google chatbot has seemingly responded in a non-sensical manner to a Grad student in a back-and-forth conversation they were having about aging adults. The grad student was seeking homework help when the chatbot responded in a threatening manner.  The response from the chatbot appeared disconnected from the context and lacked coherence, raising concerns about the current limitations of large language models (LLMs). While LLMs have made significant advancements, this incident underscores the need for further refinement in ensuring their reliability and accuracy in handling complex and nuanced topics.

“Large language models can sometimes respond with non-sensical responses, and this is an example of that. This response violated our policies and we’ve taken action to prevent similar outputs from occurring.”

– Google in a statement to CBS News

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).

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The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT)

Market Capitalization: $833.32 million

The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT) is a leading digital transformation and AI strategy consulting firm. It engages in the provision of dedicated expertise in generative artificial intelligence strategy, operations, finance, and human capital.

On Friday, November 15th, The Hackett Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:HCKT) rung the Nasdaq Stock Market Opening Bell in celebration of its recent acquisition of the GenAI development firm LeewayHertz. The acquisition marks a significant step in expanding Hackett’s AI capabilities, which will help the company offer a comprehensive end-to-end AI solution to its clients. The transaction will leverage The Hackett Group’s world-class intellectual property and AI XPLR™ platform with LeewayHertz’s Gen AI development capabilities and ZBrain™ platform.

“This acquisition is meant to highly differentiate our consulting services and software platforms. It significantly increases our AI implementation capabilities, and highly differentiates our AI XPLR™ ideation and evaluation platform. Integrating it with ZBrain™ will empower our clients to unlock the value of their data and result in new levels of innovation, customer experience and workflow productivity enabled by Gen AI-powered solutions.”

– Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of The Hackett Group.

Overall HCKT ranks 9th on our list of the AI stocks that are making waves today. While we acknowledge the potential of HCKT 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 HCKT 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.