More chatbots are coming. Uber Technologies Inc. is developing its own bot. In earnings news, cloud services companies are showing early signs of a comeback, but generative AI hasn’t done much yet to boost cloud sales. Next Monday kicks off with a financial report from Palantir Technologies Inc., which has been selling the AI angle hard to investors.
Here are the key events that happened in the AI sector during the week:
AMD Among "Best Positioned" AI Players, Analyst Says
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. shares took a hit after earnings as analysts posed questions about the company's artificial-intelligence timeline, but perhaps the company is in a better spot to take advantage of AI than others are letting on.
Benchmark analyst Cody Acree, who has a buy rating and fresh $145 price target on AMD's stock $(AMD)$, said in a recent note that he believes the chip maker is "among the best positioned companies to benefit from the tech sector's broad macro-economic adoption" of AI.
Meanwhile, AMD on Thursday announced two new additions to its Radeon line of graphics cards: the Pro W7600 and the Pro W7500 workstation GPUs, designed to accelerate workloads in the media, entertainment, and design industries.
Alibaba Rolls Out Open-Sourced AI Model to Take on Meta's Llama 2
Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group's cloud computing unit released two open-sourced artificial intelligence models on Thursday in a bid to take on Meta Platform.
The Hangzhou-based company said it has open-sourced two large language models (LLM), a type of AI model, named Qwen-7B and Qwen-7B-Chat on Thursday in a press release.
Each model has 7 billion parameters, which is often used to measure the strength. This marks the first time a big Chinese tech company has open-sourced its LLM.
It also comes after Meta unveiled a similar open-sourced model named Llama 2 last month, a move that has garnered widespread interest. Some analysts said that open-sourced models can chip away the current market dominance enjoyed by OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Google whose AI models charge users expensive fees.
Palantir Is "the Messi of AI"
Palantir Technologies Inc. is at the forefront of the artificial-intelligence revolution, according to analyst firm Wedbush, which has initiated coverage of the software maker with an outperform rating and $25 price target.
Shares of Palantir rose 10.3% on Friday and jumped another 11.4% on Monday. The company’s stock has risen 209% this year, outpacing the S&P 500’s gain of 19.5%.
Palantir is “the Messi of AI on the golden track to success,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note Friday, making a comparison to Argentine soccer star Lionel Messi, who is currently enjoying a stellar start to his MLS career at Inter Miami. “In a nutshell, we believe Palantir has built an AI fortress that is unmatched and poised to be a major player in this AI Revolution over the next decade.”
Meta Prepares Chatbots With Personas to Try to Retain Users
Facebook owner Meta is preparing to launch a range of artificial intelligence-powered chatbots that exhibit different personalities as soon as next month, in an attempt to boost engagement with its social media platforms.
The tech giant led by chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been designing prototypes for chatbots that can have humanlike discussions with its nearly 4bn users, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
These people said some of the chatbots, which staffers have dubbed “personas”, take the form of different characters. The company has explored launching one that speaks like Abraham Lincoln and another that advises on travel options in the style of a surfer, according to a person with knowledge of the plans.
Morgan Stanley Is Upbeat on Adobe’s AI Software
Adobe stock received a boost Monday from Morgan Stanley analyst Keith Weiss, who raised his rating and target price on the company's big push into generative-artificial-intelligence creative software tools. Weiss lifted his rating on Adobe stock to Overweight from Equal Weight, while boosting his target price to $660 from $510.
Weiss writes in a research note that the upgrade reflects "greater clarity" on the direction of Adobe's AI-enabled products, adding that the company's " monetization road map" increases his confidence that Adobe's creative software business can reaccelerate from here. He thinks the company can post mid-to-high teens annual earnings growth over the next three years.
Uber Is Developing an AI-Powered Chatbot to Integrate Into App
Uber Technologies Inc. is developing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot to integrate into its app, joining the long list of companies that are turning to the language tool to improve customer service, marketing and other automated tasks.
“We’re working on it right now,” Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said Tuesday in an interview on the Bloomberg Technology show. He didn’t provide details on the specifics of what the chatbot would be capable of doing, but highlighted the ways Uber currently uses AI in its business.
“We have been working with machine learning, artificial intelligence systems for years and years,” he told Emily Chang. “Every time you get matched up with a car or a courier, there are algorithms making that happen, from the time of day, distance, all of that is driven by machine learning.”