Semi-conductor/AI Stock Discussion.

I've got modest positions in GOOGL, MSFT.

I've got a bit more than 5% of my portfolio in semiconductor and related stocks: KLAC, LSE:SMSN, MTRN, AOSL, ASYS, AMKR, TRT, SCIA. I'm likely to buy more sometime in the next year, but I'm being patient because we're likely at a poor part of an industry cycle.

Robotics seem likely to benefit from AI. I suspect the main winners will be companies that aren't yet public, as I'm not too impressed by the opportunities I see so far. I'm playing this mainly via tiny positions in LIDAR companies (INVZ, OUST, LAZR) and SYM.

I have a modest position in OSS.

I tried to invest in Conjecture, but they don't seem interested in small investors.

I don't use twitter because social media use seems like a losing strategy for living in the world over the next 10 years. Is there any alternative such as an email newsletter?

Samsung is a memory play, not a TSMC competitor. Logic semiconductor is what Samsung hopes to do in the future, it is not how they make money now. In my opinion, Samsung's technical lead in memory is no less than TSMC's technical lead in logic. And transformative AI will require memory as much as CPU, GPU, and TPU.

I am surprised this is posted and even upvoted on lesswrong, the format of the post looks like something found on  reddit user post .

Someone buys a coin at an extreme low price and got out exactly at top [no rationale explained what so ever on how they did it ] , made money and they want to share the knowledge to the world and now advising  in stocks (surprisingly all mainstream)

One possible options play is puts on shutterstock, since as of about 2 weeks ago midjourney got up to a level where you can for a pittance replicate the most common and popular stock image varieties at an extremely high level of quality. (E.g. girl holding a credit card and smiling).

I think the most likely way this shakes out is adobe integrates image generation with figma and its other products, leaving "buying a stock image" as an increasingly niche and limited option for people who want an image to decorate a thing where they aren't all that particular about what the image is.

Primary question to me is on what time scale the SSTK business model dissolves in, since these changes take time.

I continue to [LW(p) · GW(p)] like TSLA.

The 50% annual revenue growth that they've averaged over the last 9 years shows no signs of stopping. And their earnings are growing even faster, since turning positive in 2020. (See fun visualization of these phenomena here and here.)

Admittedly, the TTM P/E ratio is currently on the high side, at 50.8. But it's been dropping dramatically every quarter, as Tesla grows into its valuation.

Updated my 'diversified' portfolio for this:

MSFT - 10%
INTEL - 10%

Nvidia - 15%
SMSN - 15%
Goog - 15%
ASML - 15%

TSMC - 20%

From a pure technical perspective, I'd bet that some of the ocean-based pumped energy storage companies are going to make a lot of money in 5-10 years. I think dealing with saltwater is a solvable problem here and they're just going to dominate pneumatic pumped storage or thermal batteries for coastal markets, because of higher efficiency. Not quite semiconductor though, except if as you count them as a dependent of solar and solar as semiconductor :P

any acceptable outcome to TAI would make investments irrelevant; why waste your time with investments in an economic system that must be replaced for the future to contain humanity? money is much better spent on direct action than on others' projects, as though hoping your stockholder contracts will still be honored after strong TAI causes sudden hyperinflation of all previous currencies. It is absolutely critical that TAI come with a new currency that causes this hyperinflation, and associated guarantees that all humans get a basic income of the new "ai outcomes" currency. as things are looking, people doing "investment with guaranteed payout contracts" are likely to be a major force that ensures that any attempted alignment research is simply used to prevent ai from being aligned with customers, in order to maximize control of customer behavior, and this will then destroy the investors as well. don't invest in projects that have that pattern!

I don't think i ever heard about tesla doing LLM stuff, which seems like the most relevant paradigm for TAI purposes. Can you elaborate?

While NVDA is naively the most obvious play - the vast majority of GPU-based AI systems use them, I fail to see why you'd expect it will outperform the market, at least in the medium term. Even if you don't believe in the EMH, I assume you acknowledge things can be more or less priced-in? Well, NVDA's such an obvious choice that it does seem like all the main arguments for it are priced-in which has helped get it to a PE ratio of 55.

I also don't see OpenAI making a huge dent on MSFT's numbers anytime soon. Almost all of MSFT's price is going to be determined by the rest of their business. Quick googling suggests revenue of 3m for OpenAI, and 168b total for MSFT for 2021. If OpenAI was already 100 times larger I still wouldn't see how a bet on MSFT just because of it is justified. It seems like this was chosen just because OpenAI is popular and not out of any real analysis beyond it. Can you explain what I'm missing?

I do like your first 3 choices of TSM, Google and Samsung (is that really much of an AI play though).