How Not to Go Broke Investing in Generative AI

Income & Prosperity Investing Research
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Unfortunately, a lot of investors are going to lose money with generative AI.

How do I know? Consider all these past investment themes: 

  • Solar Power
  • Cannabis Stocks
  • 3D Printing
  • Blockchain
  • Cryptocurrencies
  • Electric Vehicles (EVs)
  • Self-Driving Technology
  • Streaming Media
  • SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies)
  • WFH (Work from Home) Movement

These FOMO (fear of missing out) investment themes all materialized within the past 10 years.

They came with gushing fanfare and promises of immediate riches. Many investors were seduced by the siren song.  

Most left chaste with their tails between their legs.

We all know the FOMO investment theme of the day. It hardly needs mentioning. I’ll mention it anyway.

Generative Artificial Intelligence, or Generative AI.

What are we getting with generative AI? An addressable market of $5 trillion, $15 trillion, or $50 trillion? I don’t know, you tell me, because your answer is as legitimate as mine or anyone else’s. 

But this time is different.

The investing themes I note above were more niche and more speculative. Generative AI will be exponentially more transformative, much as the Internet was 30 years ago. 

Not only does generative AI possess the Internet’s transformative power, it is also imbued with the destructive power of an atomic bomb. It could render white-collar jobs obsolete.

This Luddite hype and fear of new technology is nothing new. It has existed for at least the past 200 years.

(FYI: The word “Luddite” arose in the early 1800s from the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs.)

Perhaps generative AI will prove to be every bit as transformative as the Internet

Here we are 30 years later and hardly a person between nine and 90 can imagine life without the Internet. The Internet has become so deeply ingrained in everyone’s life. 

The U.S. unemployment rate is 3.6% today. U.S. workers have never been more productive. So much for the mass-displacement theory. 

I would not be surprised to see a lot of big, enduring wealth created by investing in generative AI technology. The Internet, after all, led to a profusion of billionaires and eventually to companies whose market caps swell to $1 trillion and beyond 

But not now. 

History has proven more often than not that the pioneers are slaughtered. The first movers who clear the path lose their way, and then eventually their lives.

The second-generation settlers arrive a few years later and prosper. 

Alphabet/Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META), and even Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) were second-generation settlers.

Excite, Northern Lights, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, Napster, Webvan, Compuserve, AOL, Packard Bell, MySpace, Borders, where are these pioneers today? 

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) were late-arrival pioneers that survived. But both companies’ stocks went dormant through much of the first decade of the 2000s (which was an opportune time to buy both companies’ shares.)

Generative AI could prove to be as transformative as the Internet.

But transformative technology is evolutionary and adaptive technology first. Time is required to mature and become truly investment worthy.

If generative AI proves to be a transformative technology, you can be sure the investable landscape five-to-10 years down the road will resemble nothing we see today. 

I’m patient. I’m immune to the FOMO bug.

I’m waiting for the pioneers to start dying off and for the settlers to arrive before I begin to seriously invest in the generative AI theme.

Meanwhile, income investing is always there.

As I’ve said before, income investing is INVESTING – everything else is speculation.

I’m always vetting the landscape for new income investments. 

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