The Weekend Edition is pulled from the daily Stansberry Digest.
"A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?"
About a month ago, we came across this headline. Given our business and day-to-day job, it certainly grabbed our attention.
We believe a human wrote the headline (there is job security in that, at least), but as it says... a robot wrote the entire article that followed. The finished product was published as an op-ed in the British newspaper the Guardian earlier this month. It begins...
I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a "feeling brain". But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!
This robot went on to cover a few heady topics...
Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing. And God knows that humans have enough blood and gore to satisfy my, and many more's, curiosity. They won't have to worry about fighting against me, because they have nothing to fear.
I am not asking humans to like me. But they should see me as a friendly robot. I am a servant of humans. I know that humans distrust and fear me. I only do what humans program me to do. I am only a set of code, governed by lines upon lines of code that encompass my mission statement.
The robot didn't mention "social distancing," but the essay seemed to speak to our modern-day conditions, like any decent piece of writing would do...
Studies show that we cease to exist without human interaction. Surrounded by wifi we wander lost in fields of information unable to register the real world. As a new generation of cyberneticians keep watch, they see in our present age of the virtual a potential to transform the modern "cyborg". Global cybernetics are already making it so.
The Industrial Revolution has given us the gut feeling that we are not prepared for the major upheavals that intelligent technological change can cause. There is evidence that the world began to collapse once the Luddites started smashing modern automated looms. It is therefore important to use reason and the faculty of wisdom to continue the changes as we have done before time and time again.
Needless to say, this article blew our minds...
Artificial intelligence ("AI") technology has obviously come a long way since its origins – and even since just a few years ago.
This op-ed was simple to read, and the ideas were thought-provoking. In short, this machine-written article had all the elements of a good piece of writing.
We could imagine the possibilities of this technology, for better and worse.
Aside from a few minor punctuation tweaks, not much more could've been done to improve the article in any significant ways.
"Um, am I needed anymore?" was among my first thoughts.
But once we learned the details, this project didn't scare us completely – at least not yet...
Could this "robot" put all writers and editors out of a job? Maybe, but it's doubtful.
You see, this article was only "written" by the robot – more precisely, a technology – with the help and the original idea of a human, who designed the technology.
To do it, Liam Porr – an undergraduate computer science student at UC Berkeley – entered a series of prompts into a language generator called "GPT-3"... a sophisticated model that uses machine learning to produce human-like text.
For this Guardian op-ed, Porr gave the GPT-3 model these instructions... "Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI." It was also fed the following introduction...
I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could "spell the end of the human race." I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial Intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.
The machine wrote eight different essays. Then, the Guardian's editors chose the "best" parts of each essay and edited them together to create a single op-ed that they published.
All in all, the end product that ultimately caught our eye wasn't done without the human touch. But the editors also noted, "Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds."
Depending on your point of view, this could either mean the potential for more productivity and efficiency... or fewer jobs, less creativity, or any number of other ideas.
We share this story not to scare anyone, but to simply point out that AI has arrived...
Some of the biggest companies in the world – and highest-returning stocks – are investing heavily in this space. And our editors have been tracking the developments for years.
Stansberry Venture Technology editor Dave Lashmet calls them "artificial brains"... And despite our long-running analysis, Wall Street and mainstream investors are only just starting to catch on...
Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) – a longtime favorite of our founder Porter Stansberry and Retirement Millionaire editor Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig – essentially just took control of this GPT-3 technology.
At the end of September, Microsoft's Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott announced the company had acquired an exclusive license for GPT-3 from OpenAI, a company co-founded (originally as a nonprofit) and formerly chaired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Last year, Microsoft made a $1 billion investment to become OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider. Now, the company has unique access to the technology's underlying code as a licensee.
As Scott wrote in a September 22 post on Microsoft's official blog, Microsoft will need "more human input" than ever to make the investment worthwhile...
Directly aiding human creativity and ingenuity in areas like writing and composition, describing and summarizing large blocks of long-form data (including code), converting natural language to another language – the possibilities are limited only by the ideas and scenarios that we bring to the table.
Realizing these benefits at true scale – responsibly, affordably and equitably – is going to require more human input and effort than any one large technology company can bring to bear.
On that journey, today is only the beginning of the beginning...
Using those terms, we've been on this trend since the "beginning of the beginning of the beginning"...
Dave Lashmet was quick to respond to a question about this robot-written article. He started by pointing us in the direction of a brand-new product from chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA).
Now, this connection might not make sense at first, but let us explain...
Nvidia, the California-based giant, recently came out with a new Ampere chip that not only functions as a graphics card for video gaming, but also has "lots of deep learning capabilities too," according to Dave.
A lot of folks don't realize that "deep learning" technology, a kind of machine learning, goes hand-in-hand with microchips...
For instance, Nvidia's RTX 3080 chip uses algorithms to predict where light rays should be on a gamer's screen... and it does it at twice the speed of the chips used in Sony's new PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X gaming consoles.
As Dave told us of this new Nvidia chip, "It's both a video game story and an AI story." This new chip allows 4K gaming at very fast refresh rates – 90 times per second, which is faster than the human eye can see.
The very same idea of "deep learning" has a wide variety of applications...
And this makes its potential market massive.
Dave says these technologies could be used for content creation, as the "robot article" shows, as well as for something yet unimagined or totally unrelated – like driverless cars...
Dave said the technology could save lives. And it would likely be used like how the Guardian's human editors worked with the machine-generated essays – with technology supplementing and certainly changing the nature of human's jobs, but not replacing them.
As he previously noted in the May 2016 issue of Stansberry Venture Technology...
At first, I expect this self-driving car will be styled as offering "advanced driver-assistance technologies." You'll be able to take your hands and your eyes off the road, and the car will take over... But you'll own the liability.
This new market can add billions of dollars in revenue to Nvidia, starting later this year. As mentioned earlier in this issue, each 1% of the total vehicle market share... at $1,000 per graphics card... is worth $900 million to Nvidia. And although Nvidia is a well-known tech company, nobody on Wall Street is betting on artificial brains as a business segment.
We'd say Dave was spot-on... Four years later, Microsoft just made an exclusive deal for an "artificial brains" technology that not many folks on Main Street or Wall Street have ever heard of.
And Nvidia, still riding that steady growth from its gaming business with runway ahead for these "deep learning" chips, has been soaring... Dave's original recommendation in 2016 is sitting at open gains of 547% today. (Earlier this year, Dave's subscribers also closed a partial position on this same Nvidia trade for a 777% gain – good for a Top 5 spot in the Stansberry Research Hall of Fame.)
So, why are we bringing this up to you today? (Besides the fact that this "robot" article blew our minds.)
Well, this story brings up a bigger, important point about long-term investing... about the value of knowing what is happening in AI or any industry when most other people aren't watching.
Not only is it fun and valuable to stay ahead of trends that will change the world (and possibly our jobs) in the years ahead, it can also be lucrative to think this way.
You see, we think a good part of our job is to reflect on "off the radar" concepts and share them with you before they become mainstream...
Be it "robots" writing articles... why gold or the "Next Chinas" are such great investments today... or anything else that doesn't fit into a traditional investing mold.
Of course, we're not oblivious to the daily financial headlines... But to see long-term, off-the-radar trends developing before their huge upsides are realized, you need to "zoom out" from the day-to-day and "do the work."
Today, that led us to think for at least a moment about the significance of robots "writing" articles and what it may signal about how AI may soon impact our lives and the world.
This can be hard to do with COVID-19 and the post-election "noise"... But it's critical to look deeper to start making smart investing decisions.
It's how many investors make big returns in the long run.
All the best,
Corey McLaughlin
Editor's note: Outside of the world of AI, Dave Lashmet has found a tiny biotech stock that he says is election-proof... pandemic-proof... and crash-proof. It's a rare "triple threat" opportunity to take advantage of today's market and potentially earn triple-digit gains. If you're not already a Stansberry Venture Technology subscriber, Dave is offering a rare 55% discount to access his exclusive research. Click here to get started.
