3 Top Artificial Intelligence Stocks To Buy

The renaissance in artificial intelligence has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of so-called “big data”, not least because the deep learning algorithms that are redolent of AI are uniquely capable of making sense of these massive troves of information.

 

It’s not surprising that many companies in the tech world would be the first the exploit this newly emerging science. Indeed, AI is helping to disrupt entire industries with its novel approach to problem solving and number crunching.

 

With that in mind, let’s take a look at three of the most promising and profitable AI businesses on the market right now.

 

Artificial intelligence delivered one of its most publicly-visible wins in 2017, when Google’s AI subsidiary, DeepMind, created a computer program that was able to teach itself chess from scratch. The program, using an artificial neural network, didn’t just learn how to play chess – it mastered the game, going on to defeat the most sophisticated chess engine of the time, Stockfish 8.

 

The success of the program, known as AlphaZero, shocked even some industry insiders. The idea that a neural network, with no human input, could create the greatest chess player ever – human or machine – felt like an epochal moment.

But Google – now Alphabet – didn’t rest on its laurels. DeepMind, the brainchild of British computer programmer Demis Hassabis, has gone on to use this same approach to tackle what many might see as more pertinent and urgent problems.

 

One of these was the 50-year old conundrum of predicting the final shape of a protein from just its 1-dimensional amino acid sequence. Remarkably, GOOG’s AlphaFold program cracked the puzzle, winning the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiment in 2018. On the back of this victory, Alphabet created another subsidiary, Isomorphic Laboratories, a project designed to facilitate drug discovery in the wake of its protein-folding breakthrough.

 

Although Alphabet is more than just an AI company, the technology is likely to play a larger part in the firm’s constituent sectors as time goes on. Its cloud computing business, which is the fastest growing of GOOGL’s segments, is going to be a big driver of AI over the coming years.

 

In fact, as CEO Sundar Pichai remarked in comments made at the company’s latest earning release, its AI technologies continue “to drive extraordinary and helpful experiences” in many of its most important products.

 

As with most things that impact the human condition in some way, there’s also a darker side to artificial intelligence technology too. In the realm of defense and security – which, unfortunately, implies the world of war and conflict as well – the possibilities afforded to national governments by AI are just starting to be understood.

 

Indeed, a leader no less relevant than Vladimir Putin, opined in 2017 that “whoever leads in AI will rule the world”. And he’s not the only war-hawk to recognize the transformative potential that this new horizon in computing science could herald.

 

Henry Kissinger – a onetime winner of the Noble Peace Prize – is also excited by AI too. In fact, the former diplomat and political veteran of the Arab–Israeli dispute – and a proponent of the policy of détente with the USSR – believes that AI is going to alter the fundamental nature of warfare.

But just as Kissinger was convinced that the sheer destructive power of nuclear weaponry would paradoxically bring in an era of relative peace, so too could AI be used to mitigate and draw out the worst excesses of warfare’s venom.

 

One company trying to do just that is Peter Thiel’s Denver-based tech outfit Palantir. On the face of it, Palantir is just a software development firm that specializes in leveraging big data to provide insights and analytics for its many clients. But given the scope of that activity – and the upside its services deliver for businesses and public organizations alike – Palantir’s actual use case turns out to be enormous. And central to the success of its product offerings is the use of AI and machine learning.

 

The company’s most recent high-profile intervention has seen it take on a pivotal role as coordinator for the humanitarian relief efforts in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

 

Rather than just using its Gotham platform as an aid for combat participants, Palantir has also been using the “AI-ready operating system” to help alleviate the refugee crisis in the region too. By partnering with the British Home Office, Palantir is using its own computing architecture to best match Ukrainian families with those in the UK who have offered their own residences as a place of refuge.

 

Furthermore, Palantir has also been involved in ameliorating the civil effects of the war, notably by smoothing out some of the supply chain issues that inevitably arise from a conflict situation.

 

And while Palantir’s efforts in the Ukraine are commendable in and of their own right, they’re also a major plus point for investors too. The company is proving once again how diverse and applicable its technology is in a range of different settings, which in the long-term opens up the possibility of new and lucrative revenue streams.

 

Not only that, but in an age where the growing importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues can negatively affect a company’s fortunes, Palantir is demonstrating that there’s a kinder, more humane aspect to its business than once thought.

 

While AI can be used for headline-grabbing projects – such as DeepMind’s revolutionary chess engine as outlined earlier – the technology can also be employed for some fairly prosaic tasks as well. For example, machine learning algorithms are routinely used by email providers to filter out virus-infected spam messages, working quietly behind the scenes to protect users 24-hours a day.

 

Another less glamorous use for AI is in the increasingly labyrinthine regulatory industry. Indeed, IBM, a brand more famous for products it no longer sells, purchased Promontory Financial Group a few years ago to create its own risk and compliance technology wing.

 

Using what it refers to as “cognitive technology” – a kind of natural language processing that AI especially excels at – IBM is driving down costs for customers who are inundated by new and ever-changing regulatory guidelines. IBM’s proprietary RegTech – or regulatory technology – can digest reams of new legislation in real-time, advising and updating its clients accordingly. And to put the scale of the risk and compliance task into perspective, there were over 300 million pages of regulations in force by 2020 alone.

 

Branching-out into segments that utilize AI-driven solutions is a sensible strategy for IBM at this point. The company has lagged behind technological changes in recent times, having failed to expand on its server business that did well during the last millennium, if not this one.

 

That said, IBM’s Watson AI platform appears to have plenty of room in which to grow. The technology has great potential in the high-margin healthcare sector – and is already being used to inform and improve sepsis treatment, identifying those patients most at risk, and suggesting the best preventative clinical interventions to follow.

 

IBM had a good first quarter 2022 earnings report recently. The firm grew its software revenue by 12 percent, and clocked in a free cash flow of $1.2 billion too. The company’s hybrid cloud business was also up 17 percent for the previous 12 months, at $20.8 billion – an important improvement since the brand is playing catch-up with its bigger, more advanced rivals in the space.