Bill Gates Says This Will Be Worth “10 Microsofts”Has anyone seen this headline come across their email? From the Motley Fool. Their site uses Gates name often and I am curious what they might be touting.
Steve Sullivan
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It is easy enough to find the quote and–no surprise–considering it in context makes the tease seem misleading. Kudos though, I guess, to whoever dug out the apparently real actual quote from 2004. To provide a bit of that context, I quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/01/business/microsoft-amid-dwindling-interest-talks-up-computing-as-a-career.html :
In one question-and-answer session, a student asked if there could ever be another technology company as successful as Microsoft.
”If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn,” Mr. Gates responded, ”that is worth 10 Microsofts.”
Given the other text in this tease it’s a good bet that the “breakthrough” is just the legitimately important but now “old news” developments in the branch of Machine Learning known as “deep learning.”
I don’t know which stock(s) those MFers are touting, but if this first appeared in 2015 and was NVIDIA, then I’ll take back everything (ok not *everything*) disparaging or skeptical I’ve said about ’em. As it is, the earliest date I’ve seen on a version of this is August 2017 which is frankly pathetic: NVIDIA was literally the biggest 12-month and or calendar year gainer in Nasdaq or something close to that, right?, so the idea that deep learning or related AI stuff is toutworthy in itself or some kind of secret is pretty funny.
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These foolish pitches kind of make me sick. It’s little better than selling “professional gambler’s super secret amazing casino busting method to win million$.” In casinos (or investment markets) the real pros of course enrich themselves instead, then maybe sell the info after it is no longer valuable because the casino (markets) have caught on.
:q!
I think Fool started recommending NVDA way back in 2012, who knows if they saw it as anything more than a graphics company at that time though.
Yes, I clicked to find out what this story was about, only to find out that I needed to give some site my email address to really find the answer. No thanks. Did find that the original quote was Bill Gates saying that some as of yet unknown artificial intelligence break through was the “answer” to the question, however, Gates didn’t mention a specific company. Microsoft is “a” company, and if one invested in MS a couple decades ago, they would have made much money. One also has to remember that investing in Microsoft in its early days was not a “sure bet”, and I would suspect that there is no sure bet (yet) in A.I. in which to invest. As with MS, only time will tell.