Why do some investment firms send out alerts to subscribers explaining large stock price increases? That’s not what investors want to know. Look up any given stock and you’ll find that their questions always relate to some unknown calamity. When bad things happen, people turn to the Ministry of Truth for an explanation. Rarely will […]
Earlier this month, we profiled the latest frontline battle between Walmart (WMT) and Amazon (AMZN), with both retailers investing heavily in autonomous vehicle delivery. But that’s a mere skirmish compared to a much bigger prize: the $8.5 trillion global healthcare market, with the United States accounting for more than 40% of all spending at $3.65 […]
Last year, we judged Teladoc (TDOC) as the best investment into the telehealth theme – and that was just a few months before the company’s $18.5 billion blockbuster acquisition of Livongo, which developed an AI platform for managing chronic diseases like diabetes. The business model is all about providing services virtually through apps, chats, and […]
One of the big challenges over the last year or so – aside from deciding when it was safe to get a haircut again – is teasing out the ephemeral from the existential when it comes to investing in the stock market. We’ve referred to this as the remote connectivity investment thesis. Basically, investors are […]
Back in the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory created one of the first chatbots, which he named ELIZA. Weizenbaum modeled its conversational style after Carl Rogers, a psychotherapist who was known for parroting patients’ responses back at them. His hypothesis was that while chatbots could emulate human conversation superficially, they could […]
The term “uncanny valley” refers to that unsettling feeling you get when looking at an android that has been made to appear human. Of course, the problem goes away when we can make robots that are indistinguishable from humans. A paper published last week by New Yawk University claims that “bots are more efficient than humans […]
A few months ago, we wrote a piece on Some of the Latest Trends in Artificial Intelligence in which we noted that AI will have the greatest impact on “job functions where a majority of time is spent collecting and making sense of data.” At the top of that list are finance and insurance. When it comes […]
The term “conversational AI” has a much better ring to it than the term “chatbot“. One implies an interaction that’s useful and informative while the other implies a forced interaction which leads to a frustrating experience. We were recently reflecting on how easy “conversational AI” can be implemented in the world of finance because things […]
Everyone knows that probably the smartest investment we could make today would be in cryptocurrency. Said no one ever. Another sure-fire way to lose money is to invest in over-the-counter stocks, something we’ve been preaching for years. Regular readers who have been paying attention know that the safest long-term bet is to find an ETF […]
Remember when it was pretty easy to spot the crazy people on the streets because they were the ones talking to themselves? The introduction of cell phones, and then smartphones, made it much harder to differentiate the sane from the disturbed because suddenly everyone was walking down the sidewalk seemingly talking to thin air. Now, […]