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Alphabet (GOOGL) reported solid Q1 results last week and rolled out podcasts inside YouTube Music.

Wall Street analysts liked the report so much that most raised their estimates and price targets for this year and next.

The Zack Consensus EPS estimates now stand at 18% and 16% growth for 2023 and 2024, respectively.

I'll give a sampling of analyst commentary, but first let's dissect the big Artificial Intelligence news of May 1st.

Godfather of AI Says "Enough"

Here's what I wrote to members of my TAZR Trader service...

Interesting day, especially for those traders still trying to short NVIDIA (NVDA), which ramped 4% to $289.

They may be right one day, but picking that spot is a tough way to make a living.

It's far better to spot the big trends and bet on those. That's what we've tried to do with the King of AI.

Conversely, I mentioned the cloudy nature of my short-term crystal ball in March when I wrote my ChatGPT report for Zacks Confidential (where I recommended NVDA, SNPS, PATH, Microsoft (MSFT), and GOOGL)...

What I did NOT predict is that ChatGPT would catch on like wildfire this year and be the instrument that directly and rapidly teaches everyone the power of AI.

Now, we're all talking about the "super bot" in awed, hushed tones, and wondering what jobs it can replace.

Ironically today, "The Godfather of AI" is now hanging up his cleats and ready to talk about the brain damage his sport may cause.

Geoffrey Hinton was profiled in the NYT this morning and asked about his pending departure from Google.

Here were some summary highlights from a CNBC article by Jennifer Elias...

For the past decade Hinton worked part-time at Google, between the company's Silicon Valley headquarters and Toronto. But he has quit the internet giant, and he told The New York Times that hell be warning the world about the potential threat of AI, which he said is coming sooner than he previously thought.

"I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that."

Hinton, who was named a 2018 Turing Award winner for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs, said he now has some regrets over his life's work. He cited the near-term risks of AI taking jobs, and the proliferation of fake photos, videos and text that appear real to the average person.

In a statement to CNBC, Hinton said, "I now think the digital intelligences we are creating are very different from biological intelligences."

Before the Singularity

Obviously, these are concerns I share and they comprise the primary themes of my book in progress, Before The Singularity, about what we need to do with education to prepare and equip young minds for the brave new world of AI. I was inspired by what I learned in 2015-2017 about AI's potential from Harari, Tegmark, Kurzweil, Hinton, and others.

And I made a practical proposal to the National Science Foundation in 2017 about an AI-driven Learning Design Engine to create custom, interactive AR/VR lessons, in math and science especially. You can read that proposal in a Google doc from the pinned post of my Twitter feed @KevinBCook.

So how do I remain such a fan of NVIDIA under Jensen Huang's leadership?

Because of all the good they are doing by providing hyperscale data tools for scientific research. Here were two points I made in my ChatGPT report...

1) NVIDIA does deep research in nearly all applications of HPC (high-performance computing) and hyper-scale data mining and modeling that create the foundations for autonomous driving, protein and molecule discovery, factory design and automation, and the future of scientific discoveries in cancer, energy, agriculture, longevity, and climate.

2) Jensen Huang and his superior leadership strategy is not only focused on hiring the best engineering talent, but they also collaborate with major scientific institutions and technology companies to put the best tools in the smartest, most(ly) ethical hands.

For these reasons, I continuously encourage investors -- whether they own NVDA shares or not -- to frequent the company's newsroom page to see the constant stream of innovations, discoveries, and partnerships that make the industry of AI as powerful as any for business, science, and society.

(end of excerpt from ChatGPT: Time to Become an AI Conversationalist; to get a copy of that March 20 ZC report, just email Ultimate@Zacks.com and tell 'em Cooker sent you)

So here we are, benefiting greatly from the upsides of AI and now also dealing with the downsides of mass-produced "fake photos, videos and text that appear real to the average person."

As always with new technology, there are costs and unintended consequences. I learned long ago that we have to embrace that messy innovation chaos because there is no alternative with creative, ingenious human intelligence.

Hopefully the genie we just let out of the bottle can be tamed to serve humanity more for good than not.

Analyst Optimism for GOOGL

The dominators of computing power and data in the age of AI will probably remain NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Alphabet. I still think buying GOOGL near $100 is a good long-term play.

Here's what others think...

Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black raised his price target on Alphabet from $120 to $125 noting the biggest takeaway as the stabilizing growth trends at Search and YouTube, which beat Street expectations.

Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney raised his price target on Alphabet from $125 to $130 saying he "would not be surprised to see the stock remain dislocated through the first half of 2023," but continues to believe that Google will "re-emerge as the broadest, strongest global ad revenue platform," and "also would bet that Google will soon be demonstrating clearly its leadership in generative AI via new product launches and improvements."

Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak raised his price target on Alphabet from $135 to $140 citing that it "remains an underappreciated AI leader," while "incremental expense discipline is beginning to show in results."

Disclosure: I may own and recommend AI-related stocks NVDA, CDNS, MSFT, SPLK, PATH and GOOGL.

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Bull of the Day: Alphabet (GOOGL) - Yahoo Finance

By Luke Andrews Health Reporter For Dailymail.Com 17:40 01 May 2023, updated 14:25 02 May 2023

The 'Godfather of Artificial Intelligence' has sensationally resigned from Googleand warned the technology could upend life as we know it.

Geoffrey Hinton, 75, is credited with creating the technology that became the bedrock of A.I. systems like ChatGPT and Google Bard.

But the Turing prize winner now says a part of him regrets helping to make the systems, that he fears could prompt the proliferation of misinformation and replace people in the workforce.

He said he had to tell himself excuses like 'if I didn't build it, someone else would have' to prevent himself from being overwhelmed by guilt.

He drew comparisons with the 'father of the atomic bomb' Robert Oppenheimer, who was reportedly distraught by his invention and dedicated the rest of his life to stopping its proliferation.

Speaking to the New York Times about his resignation, he warned that in the near future, A.I. would flood the internet with false photos, videos and texts.

These would be of a standard, he added, where the average person would 'not be able to know what is true anymore'.

The technology also posed a serious risk to 'drudge' work, he said, and could upend the careers of people working as paralegals, personal assistants and translators.

Some workers already say they are using it to cover multiple jobs for them, undertaking tasks such as creating marketing materials and transcribing Zoom meetings so that they do not have to listen.

They refer to themselves as 'overemployed', because the tool allows them to complete the workload of each role in at least half the time.

'Maybe what is going on in these systems, is actually a lot better than what is going on in the [human] brain,' he said, explaining his fears.

'The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people a few people believed that.

'But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away.

'Obviously, I no longer think that.'

Asked about why he had helped develop a potentially dangerous technology, he said: 'I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have.'

Hinton added that he had previously paraphrased Oppenheimer when posed with this question in the past, saying:'When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.'

Hinton decided to quit Google last month after a decade at the tech giant amid the proliferation of A.I. technologies.

He had a long conversation with thechief executive of Google's parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, before departing although it is not clear what was said.

In a broadside to his former employer, he accused Google of not being a 'proper steward' for A.I. technologies.

In the past, the company has kept potentially dangerous technologies under wraps, he said. But it had now thrown caution to the wind as it competes with Microsoft which added a ChatBot to its search engine, Bing, last month.

Google's chief scientist, Jeff Dean, said in a statement: 'We remain committed to a responsible approach to A.I. We're continually learning to understand emerging risks while also innovating boldly.'

His warning comes as Silicon Valley descends into a civil war over the advancement of artificial intelligence with the world's greatest minds split over whether it will elevate or destroy humanity.

Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and the late Stephen Hawking are among the most famous critics of A.I. who believe it poses a 'profound risk to society and humanity' and could have 'catastrophic effects'.

Last month they even called for a pause in the 'dangerous race' to roll out advanced A.I., saying more risk assessments were needed.

But Bill Gates, My Pichai and futurist Ray Kurzweil are on the other side of the debate, hailing the technology as our time's 'most important' innovation.

They argue it could cure cancer, solve climate change and boost productivity.

Hinton has not previously added his voice to the debate, saying he did not want to speak out until he had formally left Google.

He surged to fame in 2012 when at the University of Toronto, Canada, alongside two students, he designed a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects such as flowers, dogs and cars.

Google later spent $44million to acquire the company that was started by Hinton based on the technology.

Advanced A.I. systems already available include ChatGPT which now has more than a billion people signed up after its release in November. Data shows that it also has as many as 100million active monthly users.

Launched by OpenAI, based in San Francisco, the platform has become an instant success worldwide.

The chatbot is a large language model trained on massive text data, allowing it to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt.

The public uses ChatGPT to write research papers, books, news articles, emails and other text-based work and while many see it more like a virtual assistant, many brilliant minds see it as the end of humanity.

If humans lose control of A.I. then it will be considered to have reached singularity, which means it has surpassed human intelligence and has independent thinking.

A.I. would no longer need or listen to humans, allowing it to steal nuclear codes, create pandemics and spark world wars.

DeepAI founder Kevin Baragona, who signed the letter, told DailyMail.com:'It's almost akin to a war between chimps and humans.

The humans obviously win since we're far smarter and can leverage more advanced technology to defeat them.

'If we're like the chimps, then the A.I. will destroy us, or we'll become enslaved to it.'

Originally posted here:

Explained: What is ChatGPT and does it threaten your job? - Daily Mail

SentinelOne S recently shared that it will provide early access to the integration it is working on with Wiz, which will offer customers a comprehensive cloud-hosted infrastructure on a single platform. This integration aims to help customers respond more efficiently to security threats by enabling them to identify and prioritize these threats. This integration will be useful for businesses of all sizes as it will allow them to manage and protect their workloads across multiple clouds, without any hassle.

In March 2023, SentinelOne announced its partnership with Wiz, which focuses on providing end-to-end cloud security to customers. The partnership between SentinelOne and Wiz combines the expertise of Wizs Cloud Native Application Protection Platform and SentinelOnes Cloud Workload Protection Platform.

SentinelOnes Singularity Platform is designed to provide real-time threat detection for cloud servers and containers. When a threat is detected, the platform automatically integrates contextual information from Wiz, such as vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposed secrets, to enhance the security teams ability to respond quickly and efficiently. This integration allows for faster triage, prioritization, and remediation of threats, improving overall security outcomes.

By combining SentinelOne and Wiz products, security teams can:

SentinelOne has recently announced its expanded distributor relationships with Carahsoft, Exclusive Networks, and Ingram Micro. With larger teams of dedicated SentinelOne experts and increased routes to market, the partners are now better positioned to take full advantage of all SentinelOne offerings, accelerating the companys penetration into key verticals across North America.

SentinelOne has been forging strategic partnerships with top enterprises like ServiceNow, Zscaler, and Okta to increase its revenue streams. These partnerships leverage the Singularity XDR platform to provide comprehensive end-to-end threat detection and automated response, which allows businesses to improve their security posture.

Read next:Barracuda enhances partner experience with new hires and global expansion

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SentinelOne and Wiz join forces to enhance cloud security - Daily Host News

Special Agent Deena Helms (Sinda Nichols) enters a bare office more an interrogation room in the basement of the Florida building where she works, dictates some business messages to Siri on her laptop, and then pauses for a moment of reflection. Hey Siri, how do you know if youre doing the right thing?, she asks. What do you believe is the difference between right and wrong? The virtual assistant does not understand the question and has no answer, but this opening scene to The Artifice Girl carefully lays out what will become the films central theme. For this is a story that raises thorny moral issues of exploitation and entrapment, of identity and oppression precisely at the interface of humanity and artificial intelligence.

In the first of three sections, Deena and her fellow agent Amos (David Girard), both investigators of sex crimes against children, bring in Gareth (played by writer/director Franklin Ritch) for questioning. Part of the contents of Gareths computer have been leaked to their organisation, leading them to suspect that this hyper-intelligent loner with a background in VFX, 3D modelling and computer programming is part of a paedophile ring and they are particularly alarmed by a photo, found in his files, of young Cherry (Tatum Matthews), not least because she is an active presence in numerous illicit chatrooms, but they have no idea who or where she is. In fact neither Gareth nor Cherry is quite who they seem, and by the end of this encounter, all four of these characters will form a secret unit the Cherry team that will change the course not just of their own lives, but of all humankind.

Confined almost entirely to single-room sets, observing a formally headed three-act structure and full of people (and a person-like thing) talking, The Artifice Girl comes with an overt theatricality that allows it to foreground character and concept while thankfully keeping the workings of online predators and traffickers off screen. At the films heart is an accidental singularity, as a technology developed for the sole purpose of hunting and entrapping paedophiles rapidly evolves into a superintelligence, leaving its handlers unsure whether they should simply go on using it as a machine, or stop objectifying it and start affording it rights, freedoms and the power of consent which is after all what they are fighting to protect in children. Meanwhile, as the AI proves as adept at deceit as the humans, and is as bound by its primary directives as its creator is driven by formative trauma, it becomes unclear just who is the puppet and who the master, who is more robotic and who more human, with means repeatedly being justified by ends.

In the first act Gareth channels the appearance and mannerisms of Domnhall Gleesons character from Alex Garlands Ex Machina (2015), who is witness to an emerging singularity; by the second act Gareth has become a close study of Mark Zuckerberg, whose current work is supposedly shepherding in the metaverse; and in the third and final act, the much older, wheelchair-bound Gareth is now played by Lance Henriksen who, while playing a game of chess with Cherry, declares, Im not trading bishops this time, in a pun on his rle as the similarly named android in James Camerons Aliens (1986). There are also evocations of Isaac Asimovs Laws of Robotics, Stephen Spielbergs A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Matthew Leutwylers Uncanny (2015), and of course Steve De Jarnatts Cherry 2000 (1988).

All these references open up a nexus of associations: a dynamic negotiation between fleshy, embodied humans, sophisticated software, mechanised frames and code that is mathematically precise if not always moral. Yet here Deenas opening questions about right and wrong are always part of the conversation, as Ritchs speculative scenarios get the viewer thinking hard about the ethics of our uncharted, exponential rush to embrace artificial intelligence.

The Artifice Girlis available now on digital platforms from Vertigo Releasing

Read more:

The Artifice Girl review: Exploring the ethics of A.I - SciFiNow

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage right now, and with the cryptocurrency market only now coming out of a year long downtrend, everyone has shifted to AI, even the crypto community.

But instead of competing with each other, the two of the most innovative technologies of the modern era can work really well together. Both AI and crypto have the potential to revolutionize different industries, such as data and finance.

These cutting-edge technologies have seen explosive growth in recent years, and many believe they will continue to intersect and influence each other in new and exciting ways. The potential for combining crypto and AI is immense, from trading, analyzing data, and fraud detection to mining and security.

A study by financial giant JP Morgan also found that institutional traders are turning their attention from blockchain to AI. At the same time, the report stated that crypto and digital coins are predicted to have the biggest increases in electronic trading volumes over the next year. So, combining crypto and AI makes all the sense, pointing to a bright future.

But this isn't anything new. There are already tons of projects that are leveraging the benefits of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence to create innovative solutions.

According toCoinGecko, more than 50 projects in the blockchain space are making use of crypto and AI. Their total market cap is more than $3 bln, and they see a 24-hour trading volume of $350 mln.

So, let's take a look at some of the most prominent artificial intelligence coins:

The 59th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $924 mln, RNDR is one of the best-performing AI coins in the 24 hours with 10.8% gains and $184.36 mln in volume to trade at $2.51. The coin is up 115% in the past month and 520% year-to-date (YTD). RNDR, however, is still down 71% from its all-time high of $8.78 hit in Nov. 2021.

Besides being one of the top-performing coins, RNDR is also the trending AI coin on CoinGecko. This has been thanks to the announcement of approving the implementation of the new Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium (BME) model on the Solana blockchain by investing about 4.8 million RNDR for RNP-002.

Earlier this year, the community voted 100% to adopt a new tokenomics model. Under this model, jobs-to-be-done is priced in USD, and creators burn RNDR tokens equivalent to the job price. Non-transferable, non-fungible Coupon Tokens (or Render Credits) are then issued to track completed jobs.

The equilibrium is achieved when the number of tokens burned equals the number minted. In case usage grows, supply decreases, creating an upward price pressure, and if usage slows down, then supply increases, creating a downward price pressure.

Render Network is a protocol that enables distributed graphics processing. The Network basically connects those looking to render images and video with those who have idle graphics processing power by using RNDR as the medium of exchange.

Recently, RNP-003 titled Resource Acquisition and Allocation for Core Team and Grants, was also concluded, which aims to achieve decentralization. According to the project, this is an important step for Render Network as this would take it from being run by a team to being run by the entire community.

In Jan., a not-for-profit organization called Render Network Foundation was also announced, which is dedicated to maintaining the core Render Network protocol and growing its community and ecosystem.

Click here to learn all about investing in RNDR.

At 105th place, AGIX has a market cap of $417 mln, and it is trading at $0.342. In the past 24 hours, the token has risen 0.8% while managing $30 mln in volume. The coin is down 15% in the past fortnight, and nearly 64% from its ATH of $0.950 hit in Jan. 2018 but is still up 216% in the past year. In 2023 so far, AGIX is up almost 650% thanks to AI mania.

Launched in 2017, SingularityNET is a blockchain-based AI project which is built on the Cardano network. The project raised $36 million in funding through an ICO six years back to create a decentralized, open-source Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Founded by AI researcher Dr. Ben Goertzel, SingularityNET is creating an ecosystem of platforms to provide AI-related services. There are already more than 10 AI-based platforms on its network that cater to finance, media, arts, entertainment, robotics, and biomedical industries.

AGIX, meanwhile, is the native cryptocurrency using which platform services can be availed. The tokens can also be staked to earn incentives and vote on governance proposals.

The token has been primarily surging due to all the attention AI space is getting, with Microsoft announcing a $10 billion investment in ChatGPT, Google announced a $300 million investment in AI startup Anthropic, and Elon Musk building a new AI company called X.AI.

Click here to learn all about investing in AGIX.

The 116th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of $359 mln is only up 2% in the past 24 hours while recording $57.8 mln in trading volume. Trading at around $0.345, FET is up 275% so far in 2023 but still down 70.5% from its $1.17 peak in Sept. 2021.

Despite the lack of gains, FET is trending on CoinGecko. The platform that uses AI to automate everyday tasks recently announced the development of new trading tools for decentralized crypto exchanges. The new platform will use AI to execute trades on behalf of users for the best possible trade outcomes and reduce manual intervention.

As we stand at the forefront of a new era in the DeFi sector, with rapidly evolving technologies and innovations, we recognize the need to go deeper into decentralization, said Fetch.ai Chief Executive Humayun Sheikh. AI agent-based trading has enormous potential to remove central points of failure and solve some of DeFi's biggest problems, such as liquidity contract hacks and rug pulls, which cost the industry billions of dollars a year.

Last month, Fetch.ai closed a $40 million funding round led by DWF Labs to advance its AI technology. Its new tools are slated for release in the Q2 of this year.

Click here to learn all about investing in FET.

IMGNAI is a low-cap coin with a market cap of $11.4 mln, putting it at 946th place in the overall crypto market. The coin is up 52% in the past month and 3,245.95% from its January 6 low of $0.00043988. The coin hit an ATH of $0.055 earlier this month in Feb. and is currently down 72.3% from this peak.

ImgnAI is building a consumer AI product Nai, which is an AI-powered image generation bot. Users can generate art using Nai, Discord, and Telegram by putting in text commands.

The project offers several custom image models that allow users to bring their imagination to life. But this is not all. In the coming years, the project team aims to expand its image generation tooling to launch products for crypto-natives and no-coiners alike.

While we're initially focused on image generation, ImgnAI is built to be so much more, reads the project's official website.

Another top trending token in the AI coin space is GPT, yet another low-cap cryptocurrency. With a market cap of $10.7 mln, GPT sits at 975th place and currently trading at $0.0395.

The token hit its ATH just last month at $0.147 and has since lost 74% of its value and is also down 9.4% from $0.0435 when it first started trading in early March.

Designed to cash in on the popularity of ChatGPT, CryptoGPT is an Ethereum layer-2 scaling solution that uses zero-knowledge (ZK) rollups to increase its throughput. ZK-rollups validate off-chain transactions using unique validity proofs, which are then bundled together and stored on the main chain.

The project also works on a data-to-AI engine, which collects, encrypts, and transfers data for applications. Instead of applying ZK technology to payments, CryptoGPT integrates it for private data transfers, the project said in the statement.

The token powers the CryptoGPT ecosystem and is used to pay gas fees on the networks and paid to users for their activity data. Users can also stake their tokens to earn validation rights.

Earlier this month, the project raised $10 million in a Series A funding round at a valuation of $250 million, led by market maker DWF Labs. This funding came on the heels of the project's Web3-focused AI assistant Alex.

Meanwhile, the proceeds from the fresh funding will be used to grow the developer team and expand the project's presence in the Asian markets, said Dejan Erja, co-founder and CTO of the AI-focused blockchain.

Overall, CryptoGPT aims to allow users to earn money by monetizing their data and planning to roll out NFTs to store it.

As of writing this, the coin that is leading the AI coins is CAI, with 24-hour gains of 20.7%. Trading at $0.0255, CAI is up 40% this past month but is down 3% in 2023. The token hit its peak in Feb. this year at $0.112 and has lost 77.8% of its value since then.

This project is an AI-powered NFT generator that aims to revolutionize the NFT and the ChatGPT space by combining the power of AI and machine learning to create unique digital assets.

According to its CEO, Martin Weiner, the project's proprietary algorithm sets it apart from others. He further stated that CryptoAI is more accurate, efficient, faster than traditional methods, and more inclusive and accessible to a wider audience.

Currently, the performance of these coins shows that the AI narrative is hot and gaining traction from everyone; be it retail or institutions. But beyond price, AI and crypto complement each other very well, as they have great potential to improve efficiency and security in many areas of life.

In conclusion, combining cryptocurrency and AI helps create new opportunities for innovation and growth.

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Do AI and Crypto Mix? Here's how Fetch.ai, Singularity.NET, and ... - Securities.io