Investment idea: basket of tech stocks weighted towards AI

post by ioannes (ioannes_shade) · 2020-08-12T21:30:58.261Z · LW · GW · 7 comments

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I'm not an investment advisor and this isn't investment advice. Excerpted from an occasional newsletter I write about investing.

Related: Engaging Seriously with Short Timelines [LW · GW], You Need More Money [LW · GW]

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Recent developments in AI (AlphaGo Zero, AlphaFold, GPT-3) make transformative AI seem plausible within the next 10-50 years.

There's no fire alarm for AGI, so now is as good a time as any to have my portfolio reflect this belief. (A little embarrassing that I've waited so long to follow my conviction here! The joys of compartmentalized cognition...)

If transformative AI follows the trend currently being set by OpenAI, where it's expensive to initially train an AI model and cheap to deploy it once trained, profits will most likely be captured by the companies that train the AIs & the value chain supporting these companies (OpenAI's API is an early version of this; see also Gwern's fantastic analysis [LW(p) · GW(p)] of the strategies of various AI research groups).

If training costs aren't the limiting factor, it's less clear that profits will be captured by the companies that own the models. This scenario feels higher variance & weirder... probably the big tech companies still benefit a lot (they're already set up to deliver services at scale and they can just buy smaller firms who might otherwise compete), and makers of GPUs & semiconductors probably still benefit as well. Peter McCluskey has a good rundown [LW(p) · GW(p)] of sectors that could benefit.

Happily these two scenarios are pretty aligned from a small-investor perspective – apart from OpenAI, a lot of AI development & the supporting value chain is housed within big tech companies, and even OpenAI runs on Microsoft compute.

Finally (and more weirdly), I think now is a good time to invest in "shamanic" leaders (h/t Max for the term). It seems like a lot of society doesn't really know how to orient anymore, so when someone comes along with a clear + compelling vision, they can raise a lot of capital. Bezos & Musk use this dynamic to power their companies; Neumann & Holmes exploited it.

This shamanic consideration isn't driving my decision-making but I take it as a plus when I see it. Amazon > Microsoft. Facebook > Google. It's a bad sign when I can't remember the name of the current CEO.

Here's how the allocation looks:

• 40% FAANG (everything except for Netflix)
• Amazon is exciting because AWS is the dominant cloud computing service, its retail business is becoming an important pillar of the global economy, and Bezos is shamanic
• Google is exciting because everyone uses gmail + youtube + maps + search, it has an AWS competitor, and it owns DeepMind, Google Brain, and Waymo
• Apple is a bit of a special case because they're still riding the winds of the culture established by Jobs (the archetypal shaman-founder), and things like Airpods Pro show they can still develop amazing products after his death. They're also building their own chips, but I haven't heard of them doing anything exciting with AI
• I'm "meh" on Facebook, though Zuckerberg is definitely shamanic. Excepting WhatsApp & Messenger, their products seem sorta evil (and their good products are subsidized by the revenue of their evil products)
• There's nothing compelling about Netflix

• 20% AI-focused ETFs
• 10% to BOTZ
• 10% to ARKQ
• This gives some exposure to random companies in the value chain that I don't want to have to track individually

• 10% non-FAANG cloud computing companies
• Microsoft, a little Oracle, a little Salesforce

• 10% GPU companies
• Nvidia, AMD, Intel

• 10% semiconductor companies
• I haven't figured out which ones yet, and I haven't figured out whether it's worth holding fabless companies
• Probably TSM, NXP BRKS, LRCX, KLAC, AMAT, and maybe some fabless names like Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek

• 10% to Chinese tech companies
• Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba
• Given what's happening with the Uighurs and in Hong Kong, holding stock in Chinese companies feels more & more like holding stock in German companies circa 1935, so I might back out of this... though everything is so globalized now that I'm not sure the analogy holds

Unfortunately all these companies are currently super expensive (many are at all-time highs), but I still think it makes sense to buy them – if we're in an AI acceleration, we'd expect to see valuations go higher & higher as firm productivity increases rapidly. Unfortunately, from the inside this would look a lot like a FOMO-driven bubble.

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