Chris’ note: As regular readers will know, the rise of artificial intelligence (“AI”) is one of the biggest profit trends on our radar. It will mint more new millionaires than any tech trend since the rollout of the internet in the 1990s.
But not everyone is on board with AI. Some folks believe these thinking machines will one day destroy the world or become our robot overloads.
But as you’ll hear today from our tech investing expert, Colin Tedards, if you stick to the science… and steer clear of science fiction… a different picture emerges.
Most notably, AIs are doing incredible work in the field of medicine – including detecting cancers before they’re visible to the human eye.
What a time to be alive…
There’s a lot of wild speculation about AI systems taking over the world and destroying humanity.
And I get it. Whenever a new technology comes along, people get fearful.
When railways were introduced in the 19th century, there were concerns that people traveling at high speeds would be unable to breathe due to a lack of air.
Some even believed that human bodies would disintegrate if subjected to such speeds.
Then when electricity came along some people feared it would cause mass insanity or be a conduit for evil spirits.
And in the 20th century, with the advent of radio, there were concerns it could be used for spying and mind control.
But if you stick to the facts… instead of speculating about fantasy scenarios… AIs hold massive potential for improving our daily lives.
Most of the media’s attention is on ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and other generative AI apps. But the really exciting news is that AI systems are curing diseases and saving lives.
Take the recent breakthrough by the Mayo Clinic in using AI to detect the deadliest form of cancer while it’s still treatable.
These Cancers Are Hidden to the Human Eye
Last year, pancreatic cancer claimed the lives of 49,830 Americans.
That’s according to figures from the government’s main agency for cancer research, the National Cancer Institute.
And roughly 64,000 more Americans developed the disease this year.
It’s a brutal diagnosis.
Pancreatic cancer attacks the tissues of the pancreas, which aids digestion. And it has the lowest survival rate of all types of cancer.
Nearly 70% of people who get the disease die within the first year. And just 12.5% of people who get the disease survive more than five years.
The reason it’s so deadly is that it spreads quickly from the pancreas to the rest of the body. If you don’t catch it fast, the diagnosis is terminal.
And critically, there has been no reliable form of early detection.
About 40% of small pancreatic cancers elude detection on CT scans (3D X-rays) until they’ve advanced to the incurable stage.
For these folks, the diagnosis is a death sentence.
That’s why the Mayo Clinic’s cancer-detecting AI model is such an exciting breakthrough.
According to a study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Gastroenterology, it’s able to detect pancreatic cancer at a stage when surgical intervention still promises a cure.
Researchers from the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center trained an AI on CT scans of more than 3,000 pancreatic cancer patients to search for early stages of the cancer.
The model could spot cancers doctors missed on CT scans done three to 36 months before patients got a clinical diagnosis.
These cancers were hidden to the human eye. But the AI’s pattern recognition skills picked them up an average of 438 days before a human doctor made a diagnosis.
That’s early enough to have a shot at removing the tumors before they spread through the body and kill the patient.
And pancreatic cancer isn’t the only form of cancer AI can detect better than human doctors.
More Lifesaving Results
AIs are also better at detecting breast cancer.
That’s according to a study of more than 80,000 women in Sweden who underwent a mammogram between April 2021 and July 2022.
The study split the women into two groups.
For one group, an AI read the mammogram before it was analyzed by a radiologist. The other group’s mammograms were read by two radiologists without the use of AI.
The group whose scans were read by a radiologist along with AI had 20% more cancers detected than the group whose mammograms were read by two human radiologists.
Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer among women worldwide.
And like with pancreatic cancer, your chances of surviving it go up the earlier you spot it on a scan.
So, that’s a lifesaving result.
And there’s another advantage to using AIs to detect cancers. It cuts the amount of time a human radiologist needs to spend reading each mammogram.
The researchers in the breast cancer detection trial estimated that it would take one radiologist with the help of AI four to six months less to read about 40,000 mammograms than it would take two radiologists.
So, radiologists can screen thousands more mammograms with the help of an AI than they’d be able to do alone.
This means more women have the chance to detect breast cancer early and beat it.
And the most incredible thing about it is we’re still in the early stages of what these diagnostic AIs can do.
Ten years from now, these systems will have gotten so good at detecting cancer in its early stages they’ll be saving millions of lives a year.
Investing in the “Brains” of AI
That’s what I love about investing in the companies making the AI revolution possible.
Not only are the returns on offer potentially life-changing… so are the results of deploying these systems.
And right now, there’s one way to play it that, for me, is a no-brainer.
As I’ve been showing you in these pages, these systems need a special kind of computer chip to run efficiently.
It’s called a GPU – Graphics Processing Unit. These chips were originally designed to make 3D graphics possible for computer games.
They allow for many computations at once. So, they’re also perfect for AI tasks, which often involve performing numerous mathematical operations simultaneously.
Think of them as the “brains” of AI. Without them, these AI systems couldn’t run efficiently or at scale.
That’s why shares in the world’s largest AI chipmaker Nvidia have become a stock market darling and more than tripled in value this year alone.
As I’ve been showing you, this has left Nvidia’s shares priced for perfection. Any let-up in sales and profit growth will set it up for a fall.
That’s why I don’t recommend you buy Nvidia today. But there’s another chipmaker that’s a screaming buy right now.
It’s selling for a nearly 80% discount to Nvidia on a price-to-sales basis. And it’s just released a new AI chip that outperforms Nvidia’s premier AI chip, the H100.
I call this stock the Next Nvidia. And I recently put together a video presentation all about it. So, if you haven’t already, make sure to check that out here.
Regards,
Colin Tedards
Editor, The Bleeding Edge