The Week in AI

Welcome back to The Week in AI. I'm Kevin Cook, your field guide and story teller for the fascinating arena of artificial intelligence.

Last week was full of goodies, highlighted by an NVIDIA NVDA earnings call that reassured investors the ramp of the new Grace Blackwell super systems was accelerating.

In the video that accompanies this article, I go over the key numbers. I also address the second biggest (imo) reveal of the conference call: Jensen spent 2/3 of his opening remarks explaining the facts and consequences of using export controls on China.

You can also get the details in this article...

NVIDIA Earnings: 3 Giga Takeaways

The Robots and Agents Want Your Job

My second big AI news item in the video was the interview that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei did with Axios where he expressed his concerns that few leaders were talking about the coming job disruption, especially for entry-level knowledge workers, aka "white collar."

The video shows several quotes and stats from him.

Next up was my blunder for the week. I mistakenly took news about a partnership between Google and Reddit as recent, when the story was actually a year old.

But it still helped me emphasize a larger trend: enterprises building LLMs (large language models) are running out of data on the open internet and elsewhere to train their models.

This was the genius of Google getting exclusive rights to Reddit forums for only $60 million. Just think of the millions of threads where real humans exchange ideas, product reviews, and arguments. This clearly helped Google's Gemini catch up in the AI race.

And this is why NVIDIA is creating platforms like Omniverse and Cosmos for enterprises to simulate the real world and then train autonomous machines like self-driving cars and humanoid robots on synthetic data.

When you can run billions of training and reinforcement learning iterations in a matter of hours, then self-training inference can begin to take over and further accelerate the intelligence process.

The Robots Want Your Energy Too

In the video, I share a little about one of the bright young challengers to Elon Musk's Optimus robots. Figure describes themselves as an "AI Robotics company building the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot."

Figure is still private, and has a dozen other serious competitors. So it should be exciting when these companies start to IPO. Meanwhile, I've been recommending investors grab a starter position in the Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence ETF BOTZ.

NVIDIA is usually the largest holding and owning the ETF is a good, low-risk way to become familiar with the other companies.

Speaking of ETFs, I also recommend investors grab the Range Nuclear Renaissance Index ETF NUKZ because the datacenter build-out is creating a surge in demand for nuclear power innovations like the small modular reactors (SMRs).

In the video, I highlight one company that has vaulted since President Trump initiated a new program to support the nuclear industry: Oklo OKLO.

Here's what I wrote to my TAZR Trader members on Friday as we began more serious research on these companies (after I missed the April lows)...

Why NUKZ Now After the Rally?

Btw, SMR stands for "small modular reactor" technology.

Yes, I missed our chance to buy a nuclear company as they all "exploded" this week after the White House announced new policies to support the industry.

Trump signed the executive orders last week attempting to speed up permitting for reactors and expand domestic enriched uranium production.

Here's what some of the popular names did as they gapped up on Friday 5/23...

Centrus Energy LEU +18%
NuScale Power SMR +25%
Oklo OKLO soared +29.5%

William Blair initiated coverage on Centrus and Oklo this week. UBS felt compelled to double their PT on NuScale from $17 to $34, but maintained a Neutral rating.

Subsequently the stocks all reached for new highs and are falling back, likely to fill some of their gaps.

OKLO and SMR are very richly valued with sales just emerging. They remind me of our quantum plays trading over 100X sales.

So the time is right for a low-risk ETF that gives us nuclear exposure and makes me follow the companies more closely (like I should have been).

Incidentally, former Oklo board member Chris Wright now leads the U.S. Department of Energy. Following more closely would have put that info top of mind.

Big picture, the country needs at least 50 of these new SMRs in the next decade to support the datacenter build-out. This should also have you thinking of some of the big E&C (engineering & construction) companies, like my colleague Tracy Ryniec who owns Sterling Infrastructure in her Value Investor portfolio.

(end of excerpt from TAZR Trader)

Be sure to watch the video to hear about other great AI resources on X, including Robert Scoble and Ethan Mollick.

Talk soon,

Cooker

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