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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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