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Technology stocks reigned supreme in the first half of the year, far outperforming the wider market. But sustaining that rally will be tough, and investors need to look now for tech stocks that are ready to benefit from the growth of artificial intelligence.
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Stock futures were falling following three straight days of losses for Wall Street. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell again will be delivering testimony before Congress. His comments on Wednesday that the central bank likely would be raising rates further this year pushed markets lower.
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Chip maker
Intel
offered positive news on its foundry business Wednesday as it continues to build out new facilities to expand the custom chip-making service. Investors sold the stock anyway.
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Tesla Stock’s Winning Streak Ended. Wall Street Says Ford, GM, AI Made It All Happen.
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Cyan, the studio behind Myst and Riven, has for the last few years been funding its games via Kickstarter. That’s how 2016’s Obduction was made, and it’s also how 2023’s Firmament—with more than a little help from machines this time—was developed as well.
For a studio with such an illustrious history, the decidedly mixed reviews for Firmament should be something of a surprise. Fans are down on some of the puzzle design, but they also repeatedly mention how flat the game’s world feels, how poor the narration is and the sparsity of Firmament’s in-game lore, which really stand out when compared to Cyan’s 90s blockbusters.
Turns out there’s a good reason for some of that. As Gregory Avery-Weir first pointed out after sitting through the game’s credits, the longer you sit through them the more you find that some jobs—like voice acting—don’t get a mention where you’d expect them, alongside composers and artists. Indeed by the time the credits are thanking external partners like Nvidia, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’d forgotten to acknowledge their voice actors entirely.
Until you get to this, literally the last credit flashed on the screen before they start thanking streams of Kickstarter backers:
That sure explains why so many pieces of in-game lore—like “journals, logs, checklists, newapapers, stories, songs, poems, letters” and “loosely scattered papers”—have been described as being so underwhelming, and why so many players had complaints about the lifelessness of its narration.
I reached out to Cyan and asked them specifically about the level of human involvement in the game’s narration and lore texts (newspapers, letters, etc). Their response:
“AI Assisted Content” listed in the credits for Firmament is, well, exactly that. It is content of which its final state you see it as in the game as was assisted, not wholly created, by services built on what many refer to as “AI” that Cyan staff made use of.
For example, all voice acting content was performed by an actual human being 100% of the time (which may have been obvious already if you have listened to it, especially considering the performance cadence and content — we can’t imagine what it would be like if wholly machine generated, to your question) but the final performance timbre, pitch, and tone was modified with one of these services, with the performer’s consent. Hopefully that clarifies things more and provides a good example of what we mean by “AI Assisted Content”.
Note that doesn’t explain why those voice actors aren’t credited (when the AI is!), why they used AI (and not regular recording/mixing tools) to modify the “timbre, pitch, and tone” of a human’s voice, and doesn’t address the numerous other instances fans have complained about, like the poems and songs.
This sucks! This is the third game in a month we’ve had to highlight for either featuring or standing accused of featuring terrible, obviously machine-generated content. The feedback in each instance—even on this game’s Kickstarter page, where many backers pledged their support years ago, before AI-generated content was even a thing—has been clear: people do not want this stuff in their games!
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Luke Plunkett
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Real estate investment trusts have had a tough couple of years, but opportunities abound—if you know where to look.
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Artificial intelligence may destroy humanity, but not before creating enormous wealth. Such is the paradox that now confronts investors after
Nvidia
recent earnings report inadvertently created a large-scale ethics experiment on Wall Street.
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Nvidia, an artificial intelligence and chip company headquartered in California, hit a $1 trillion market value on Tuesday, making it the first chip company to do so, according to Reuters.
The company’s stock rose 4.4% on Tuesday morning and about 25% over the past week. The reason? The demand for AI. The company engineers “the most advanced chips, systems, and software” for AI. Shares are now worth around $408.
Nvidia is the leader in making AI chips, but some experts say that is overvalued, according to Forbes.
Last week, the company forecast their second-quarter revenue to be more than 50% above Wall Street estimates, leading analysts to increase their price targets, according to Reuters. The company said it is boosting production of the chips, which are used in products like ChatGPT, the AI bot that can complete tasks and answer questions with impressive accuracy.
In an interview with Reuters, Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the company began producing new AI chips in August and the increasing popularity of AI led to a steep demand increase by January.
“We had to place additional orders, and we procured substantially more supply for the second half” of 2023, Huang said.
With a $1 trillion value, Nvidia joins the ranks of other tech companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft. In fact, it would be the sixth highest valued public company, according to Forbes.
Apple comes in at number one, worth an estimated $2.79 trillion. In 2022 it was the first company to reach a $3 trillion value, according to Forbes.
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, President and Vice Chair of Microsoft Brad Smith said he expects the U.S. government to regulate artificial intelligence in the year ahead.
Some tech executives, including Elon Musk, have urged for the regulation of AI, which is used in systems like Google’s Bard and even Roombas. During a hearing for the Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, Sam Altman, the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT, said artificial intelligence could “go quite wrong.”
“If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,” he said. “We want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that happening. But we have to be clear-eyed about it.”
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London
CNN
—
WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency, has teamed up with chipmaker Nvidia to create ads using generative artificial intelligence.
The companies announced the partnership Monday, with Nvidia
(NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang unveiling WPP’s new content engine during a demo at Computex Taipei.
“Generative AI is changing the world of marketing at incredible speed. This new technology will transform the way that brands create content for commercial use,” WPP CEO Mark Read said in a statement.
The platform will enable WPP
(WPP)’s creative teams to integrate content from organizations such as Adobe and Getty Images with generative AI to produce advertising campaigns “more efficiently and at scale,” according to WPP
(WPP). This would enable companies to make large volumes of advertising content, such as images or videos, “more tailored and immersive,” the company added.
In the demo screened by Huang, WPP had created realistic footage of a car driving through a desert.
The new AI-powered content engine means that same car could be placed on a street in London or pictured in Rio de Janeiro to target the Brazilian market — all without the need for costly on location production.
Just as advertising campaigns can be rapidly adapted for different countries or cities, they can also be customized for different digital channels, such as Facebook or TikTok, and their users.
“You can build very finely tuned campaigns to resonate with an audience… On the other hand, you could make up imaginary scenarios that never existed in real life,” Greg Estes, vice president of developer programs at Nvidia told CNN.
The platform is the latest example of how AI is being rapidly deployed by major companies to enhance productivity and deliver new products to customers. Many in the advertising and media industries are concerned about threats to their jobs because of the way that AI is able to aggregate information and create visual content indistinguishable from photography.
WPP said its new platform “outperforms current methods” of having people “manually create hundreds of thousands of pieces of content using disparate data coming from disconnected tools and systems.” In other words, the new technology could mean that much smaller creative teams are ultimately able to do the same amount of work.
“It’s much easier to identify the jobs that AI will disrupt than it is to identify the jobs that AI will create,” Read told the Financial Times Monday. “We’ve applied AI a lot to our media business, but very little to the creative parts of our business.”
Nvidia’s Huang said: “The world’s industries, including the $700 billion digital advertising industry, are racing to realize the benefits of AI,” adding that WPP would now enable brands to “deploy product experiences and compelling content at a level of realism and scale never possible before.”
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AI is coming to games, whether you like it or not. Last night’s Nvidia keynote showed just how powerful—and devastating—that’s going to be. The company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, showed off how its freshly announced “Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine” (ACE) can create real-time interactive AI NPCs, complete with improvised voiced dialogue and facial animation.
While the focus of AI’s incursion into gaming spaces has perhaps so far been mostly on the effects for artists, it’s writers who should already have the most to fear. Given how mediocre the standards are for NPC dialogue and quest texts in games, it’s absolutely inevitable that the majority of such content will be AI-written in the near future, despite the potential fury and protests that will come in its wake. But Nvidia’s reveal last night suggests that the consequences could be far farther-reaching, soon replacing voice actors, animators, lighting teams, the lot.
ACE is Nvidia’s “suite of real-time solutions” for in-game avatars, using AI to create characters who can respond to unique player interaction, in character, voiced, and with facial expressions and lip-syncing to match. To see it in action (or at least, in purported action—we’ve no way of verifying the footage the company played during the Computex 2023 keynote), take a look at this. It should start at 25 minutes, the clip starting at 27:
So what you’re seeing here is an in-game character responding in real-time to words the player says out loud, uniquely to how they phrased the questions, with bespoke dialogue and animation. The character has a backstory, and a mission it’s compelled to impart, but beyond that the rest is “improvisation,” based on the words the player says to it.
This is the most immediately obvious use of ChatGPT-like AI as we currently understand it, which is essentially a predictive text model writ large. It’s ideal for creating characters able to say coherent, relevant conversational dialogue, based on inputs.
Now, there are two very obvious issues to mention straight away, the first being how awful and flat the character’s performance is in this clip. But remember, this is the first iteration of this tech, and then put it in the context of how, until about ten minutes ago, computer-generated voices all sounded like Stephen Hawking. This’ll advance fast, as AI models better learn to simulate the finer nuances of human speech.
The second issue is that absolutely no one playing a game like this would stick to the script as happens in this clip. In fact, the first thing just about everyone would say to such an NPC would be something about fucking. For reference, see all text adventure players ever in the early 1980s. That’s going to be the more difficult aspect for games to overcome.
Of course, application of the tech is going to be viewed as far less important in the face of just how many jobs ACE is looking to replace. Huang so nonchalantly mentions how the AI is not only providing the words and voice, but is doing the animation too. And this is in the wake of his previously explaining how AI is being used to generate the lighting in the scene, and indeed improve the processing power of the graphics technology that’s creating it all.
There’s no version of reality where this doesn’t see a huge number of people in games development losing jobs—albeit most likely those who haven’t gotten said jobs yet. Why hire new animators for your project when the AI will do it for you, backed up by the dwindling team you’ve already got? Who’s going to look for new lighting experts when there’s a lighting expert living inside your software? Let alone the writers who currently generate all the dialogue you currently skip past.
And this isn’t futuristic stuff to concern ourselves with somewhere down the line: it already exists, and it’s going to be appearing in games that release this year. With the announcement of ACE, this is all going to be exacerbated a lot faster than perhaps anyone was expecting.
For game studios, this is great news! The potential for such technology is incredible. Games that are currently only achievable by teams of hundreds will become realistically achieved by teams of 10s, even individuals. We, as players, will soon be playing games where we can genuinely roleplay, talk directly to in-game characters in ways the likes of Douglas Adams fantasized about and failed to achieve forty years ago.
But when it comes to specialist jobs in the industry, it’s going to be carnage. And this will happen, as certainly as automated textile equipment makes all our clothes.
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John Walker
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/amazon-misses-rally-8a6e2511
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M&R Capital Management Inc. lowered its stake in NVIDIA Co. (NASDAQ:NVDA – Get Rating) by 18.5% in the 4th quarter, according to its most recent disclosure with the SEC. The fund owned 1,105 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock after selling 250 shares during the quarter. M&R Capital Management Inc.’s holdings in NVIDIA were worth $161,000 at the end of the most recent quarter.
Several other hedge funds and other institutional investors have also recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Vanguard Group Inc. lifted its position in NVIDIA by 1.2% in the third quarter. Vanguard Group Inc. now owns 203,747,246 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock valued at $24,732,878,000 after purchasing an additional 2,326,387 shares during the last quarter. State Street Corp lifted its position in NVIDIA by 0.9% in the third quarter. State Street Corp now owns 98,751,264 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock valued at $11,987,416,000 after purchasing an additional 908,481 shares during the last quarter. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD lifted its position in NVIDIA by 7.2% in the second quarter. Price T Rowe Associates Inc. MD now owns 56,929,819 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock valued at $8,629,991,000 after purchasing an additional 3,813,087 shares during the last quarter. Legal & General Group Plc lifted its position in NVIDIA by 4.4% in the second quarter. Legal & General Group Plc now owns 18,243,948 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock valued at $2,765,602,000 after purchasing an additional 764,184 shares during the last quarter. Finally, UBS Asset Management Americas Inc. lifted its position in NVIDIA by 3.3% in the second quarter. UBS Asset Management Americas Inc. now owns 14,612,261 shares of the computer hardware maker’s stock valued at $2,215,073,000 after purchasing an additional 467,060 shares during the last quarter. Institutional investors own 61.80% of the company’s stock.
In other news, Director John Dabiri sold 293 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Monday, December 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $165.80, for a total transaction of $48,579.40. Following the transaction, the director now directly owns 2,417 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $400,738.60. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at the SEC website. In other NVIDIA news, Director John Dabiri sold 293 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Monday, December 19th. The stock was sold at an average price of $165.80, for a total value of $48,579.40. Following the transaction, the director now owns 2,417 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $400,738.60. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which can be accessed through this hyperlink. Also, Director Mark L. Perry sold 20,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Monday, February 27th. The shares were sold at an average price of $236.37, for a total value of $4,727,400.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the director now directly owns 140,000 shares in the company, valued at approximately $33,091,800. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Insiders have sold a total of 293,066 shares of company stock valued at $51,229,679 over the last ninety days. 4.04% of the stock is currently owned by corporate insiders.
Shares of NASDAQ:NVDA opened at $257.25 on Friday. The company has a market cap of $635.41 billion, a P/E ratio of 147.84, a PEG ratio of 4.53 and a beta of 1.76. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.44, a current ratio of 3.52 and a quick ratio of 2.73. NVIDIA Co. has a 1 year low of $108.13 and a 1 year high of $289.46. The stock’s fifty day moving average price is $210.84 and its 200-day moving average price is $167.00.
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA – Get Rating) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, February 22nd. The computer hardware maker reported $0.88 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.81 by $0.07. The firm had revenue of $6.05 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $6.02 billion. NVIDIA had a return on equity of 26.61% and a net margin of 16.19%. The company’s quarterly revenue was down 20.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the company posted $1.14 earnings per share. Sell-side analysts expect that NVIDIA Co. will post 3.21 earnings per share for the current year.
The firm also recently declared a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Wednesday, March 29th. Stockholders of record on Wednesday, March 8th will be issued a dividend of $0.04 per share. This represents a $0.16 dividend on an annualized basis and a dividend yield of 0.06%. The ex-dividend date is Tuesday, March 7th. NVIDIA’s payout ratio is currently 9.20%.
Several equities analysts have recently issued reports on NVDA shares. StockNews.com started coverage on NVIDIA in a research note on Thursday. They set a “hold” rating on the stock. Raymond James reissued a “strong-buy” rating and set a $290.00 target price on shares of NVIDIA in a research note on Thursday, March 2nd. Cowen boosted their target price on NVIDIA from $200.00 to $220.00 in a research note on Monday, December 12th. Jefferies Financial Group boosted their target price on NVIDIA from $275.00 to $300.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Thursday, February 23rd. Finally, BMO Capital Markets boosted their target price on NVIDIA from $210.00 to $240.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research note on Tuesday, February 21st. Two equities research analysts have rated the stock with a sell rating, eight have given a hold rating, twenty-six have assigned a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the company has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $245.32.
NVIDIA Corp. engages in the design and manufacture of computer graphics processors, chipsets, and related multimedia software. It operates through the following segments: Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), Tegra Processor, and All Other. The GPU segment consists of product brands, including GeForce for gamers, Quadro for designers, Tesla and DGX for AI data scientists and big data researchers, and GRID for cloud-based visual computing users.
Want to see what other hedge funds are holding NVDA? Visit HoldingsChannel.com to get the latest 13F filings and insider trades for NVIDIA Co. (NASDAQ:NVDA – Get Rating).
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ABMN Staff
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Silicon Valley could use a reboot. The biggest players aren’t growing, and more than a few are seeing sharp revenue declines. Regulators seem opposed to every proposed merger, while legislators push for new rules to crack down on the internet giants. The Justice Department just can’t stop filing antitrust suits against Google. The initial public offering market is closed. Venture-capital investments are plunging, along with valuations of prepublic companies. Maybe they should try turning the whole thing on and off.
The only strategy that seems to be working is to lay people off. Tech CEOs suddenly are channeling Marie Kondo, tidying up and keeping only the people and projects that “spark joy,” or at least support decent operating margins. Layoffs.fyi reports that tech companies have laid off more than 122,000 people already this year.
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Yesterday, Larian Studios announced Baldur’s Gate III will come to PS5 the same day the PC version leaves Early Access. It sounded like an exclusivity agreement might be keeping it off Xbox, but the devs say that’s not the case. So what’s the hold-up? Getting the co-op RPG’s splitscreen action to work on the weaker Xbox Series S.
Larian revealed the August 31 launch date for the PS5 console port in a new trailer during Sony’s latest State of Play that, among other things, showcased actor J.K. Simmons voicing newly revealed villain General Ketheric Thorm. It’s normal for Sony-promoted teases to leave out competitors’ platforms, but when fans didn’t see an Xbox release date on Larian’s website either, they began to wonder.
Today, the studio clarified what’s going on, stating that an Xbox version will arrive if and when Larian can get splitscreen gameplay working across both Series S and Series X:
We’re seeing a lot of varied interpretations of what that means, so we wanted to clarify further. We’ve had an Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate III in development for some time now. We’ve run into some technical issues in developing the Xbox port that have stopped us feeling 100% confident in announcing it until we’re certain we’ve found the right solutions—specifically, we’ve been unable to get splitscreen co-op to work to the same standard on both Xbox Series X and S, which is a requirement for us to ship.
There’s no platform exclusivity preventing us from releasing BG3 on Xbox day and date, should that be a technical possibility. If and when we do announce further platforms, we want to make sure each version lives up to our standards and expectations.
It’s an especially interesting wrinkle considering players have long speculated about the trade-offs and challenges involved in developing games for the similarly-specced PS5 and Xbox Series X that must also accommodate the less powerful Series S. Splitscreen can be an especially taxing feature, and was notably dropped from Halo Infinite last year as 343 Industries tried to salvage the online shooter’s live-service ambitions.
Baldur’s Gate III’s minimum PC specs already require an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card at minimum, with a GeForce RTX 2060 recommended. While not likely to push PC players’ hardware the way recent blockbusters such as the Dead Space remake or The Callisto Protocol have, it’s still more than what your average isometric RPG fan probably has on hand. The console port could potentially be a big boon then to those who don’t already have a higher-end gaming PC, or the funds to upgrade. That said, for now it seems like the $250 Series S might be getting in the way.
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Ethan Gach
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CNN
—
Microsoft announced it has agreed to partnerships with Nvidia and Nintendo as it tries to convince European Union officials to approve its $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard — the company behind the popular game franchise Call of Duty.
Microsoft President Brad Smith had a closed-door meeting Tuesday with EU regulators and competitors in Brussels to address concerns that its acquisition of Activision Blizzard could hurt competition in the video game industry. The deal has also come under scrutiny from regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Microsoft
(MSFT) said that it has entered into a 10-year partnership with Nvidia to bring Xbox PC games to Nvidia’s cloud gaming service. In a statement, the software giant said the partnership “resolves Nvidia’s concerns with Activision Blizzard. Nvidia therefore is offering its full support for regulatory approval of the acquisition.”
Microsoft also revealed it has finalized a 10-year agreement to bring the latest version of “Call of Duty” to the Nintendo platform once the merger with Activision is completed.
Smith told CNN’s Richard Quest on Tuesday that “a lot changed today because Microsoft has announced two agreements that together will bring Call of Duty, the game that everyone has been talking about, to 150 million more people on Nintendo devices and Nvidia’s cloud streaming services.” He went on to say these two deals address the concern that Call of Duty will be less available than it is today and will be more available instead due to these two binding agreements.
“We’re really down to one principal company that is objecting to this deal, and that’s Sony, and we’ve made clear that we’re happy to enter a 10-year agreement with Sony and we’re prepared to enter regulatory obligations as well, whether it’s London or Brussels or Washington,” Smith said. “So, in addition to a contract, we’d have a duty under the law.”
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