- Phase 3 of the 5G rollout has begun
- In the age of COVID-19, this blue-chip technology stock is a “must own”
- How does an AI “decide”?
Dear Reader,
Amid the market chaos, not a day passes that I don’t see positive progress on addressing COVID-19.
Pharmaceutical giant Roche Diagnostics is delivering 400,000 swab testing kits to hospitals and laboratories this week. And better yet, it plans on shipping an additional 400,000 testing kits per week to U.S. test sites.
In contrast, The New York Times put out a very negative piece on the public-private partnership with Verily, the health care division of Google, and the U.S. government because the site was overloaded within the first 24 hours.
There is no place for this, and nothing good comes from fomenting more fear. Thousands of people are working night and day to get the website launched, the system tested quickly, and everything rolled out nationwide. All involved should be commended for getting this up so quickly. Yes, there will be “bugs,” but I am certain they will be fixed quickly.
And with 400,000 testing kits coming every week, the U.S. and other markets around the world will be able to quickly get far more accurate data. The biggest problem is that the vast majority of people that contract COVID-19 don’t get tested and have no idea that they have it. The symptoms are too mild or even nonexistent.
The more accurate data we have, the more informed we become. Rather than relying on opinions, we can be informed by a far more realistic data set.
And we can understand what the real recovery percentages are. We will also understand the actual mortality rate as a percentage of a much larger population that has contracted the virus (it is going to be dramatically lower than what the fearmongers in the press will have us believe).
When we near this point in the future, we will reach the turning point in the equity markets.
In the meantime, the market’s fear-based overreaction has presented some incredible buying opportunities. My team and I have been building our buy lists for our subscribers. I doubt we’ll see an opportunity like this for many years. And I’m not the only one who sees this.
My colleague Teeka Tiwari believes the market downturn has presented some excellent entry points. Specifically, Teeka is looking at the cryptocurrency market.
For readers who don’t know, Teeka is the analyst who delivered some incredible gains to his readers during the crypto bull market of 2017.
Readers know that I don’t make cryptocurrency recommendations myself. But I’m a proponent of blockchain technology and the long-term potential of quality digital assets.
And like me, Teeka emphasizes the importance of proper position sizing in speculative assets like cryptos.
So if you’re interested in speculating in the cryptocurrency market, you can learn more from Teeka during his cryptocurrency training event. It takes place tonight at 8 p.m. ET. You can go right here to reserve your spot.
Phase Three of the 5G boom is already underway…
As regular readers know, wireless networks like 5G roll out in three phases.
Phase One is infrastructure. That’s when the industry erects the infrastructure needed to support the new wireless network. I’m talking about cell towers, base stations, fiber optics, routing equipment, and so on…
Phase Two is the devices phase. Once the infrastructure is in place, networks come online. And that’s when 5G-enabled devices, including 5G smartphones, begin going up for sale.
Phase Three is applications. That’s when we get all kinds of useful and interesting applications running on top of 5G. And I am excited to say that Phase Three of the 5G boom just kicked off…
Barcelona has equipped its city buses with augmented reality (AR) windows that project real-time data and updates about key attractions as people ride through the city.
For example, as riders pass by a historic building, the window might display more information about its significance. Or as riders pass by a local restaurant, the window might display a menu. Then, touch sensors allow riders to select items they find interesting to get more information. Here’s a visual:
The AR Bus Screen
Source: VentureBeat
This is a great example of an application running over 5G. And The Bleeding Edge readers are among the first to see it…
This AR display was deployed earlier this year in time for the Mobile World Congress, which is the largest wireless technology conference in the world. Unfortunately, the conference was called off due to the COVID-19 outbreak. And Barcelona has largely been on lockdown in an effort to thwart the virus. So very few people have experienced this technology yet.
That means we’re among the first to get a glimpse of the display. And we will see more and more 5G-enabled AR functions pop up in the coming months.
Self-driving cars will leverage 5G technology. We’ll likely see AR windshield displays designed to provide drivers with helpful information.
We can think of this as a far richer, more graphic and useful heads-up display. Today, cars might only display the speed of the car or very simple directions for navigation. And we’ll certainly see more window displays like this one, which will be used for general information, tourism, and even advertising.
The bottom line is, 5G is about to get even more “real.”
And thanks to the massive pullback we’ve seen in the markets, 5G stocks are now the cheapest they have been since 2016 – before anyone knew what 5G was. That provides us with a massive investment opportunity today. To learn more about my No. 1 large-cap 5G stock for 2020, go right here.
Amazon is on the rise…
Amazon just announced that it is hiring 100,000 more employees. The company is already the second-largest U.S.-based employer behind Walmart, with 800,000 employees worldwide… And it needs to increase its workforce by nearly 13%. Why?
Thanks to the COVID-19 outbreak, consumers are now using Amazon more than ever before. As people are staying home more and practicing “social distancing,” they are flocking to Amazon’s e-commerce platform for their everyday purchases.
In fact, demand is so heavy that it is stressing Amazon’s logistical network. And that’s no small feat. As we talked about last December, Amazon was already shipping billions of packages every year.
Readers who have made a purchase on Amazon in recent days will probably have noticed the same thing I have: two-day Prime deliveries aren’t always coming in two days any longer. One of my orders took a full five days to show up. That’s how stressed the network is.
In response, Amazon is raising its pay by $2 per hour to attract new workers and to compensate existing workers for the increased workload.
This is a transformative event for the company. The virus outbreak has led people who don’t normally shop on Amazon to give it a try. I do not doubt that many people will realize how convenient it is and continue to shop at Amazon.com after COVID-19 is a distant memory.
So this shift in consumer behavior bodes well for Amazon. What’s more, its cloud services division, Amazon Web Services, is seeing increased demand right now, as more workers stay home and rely on cloud-based services throughout the day.
That means Amazon’s two most important businesses are seeing a flurry of demand right now. Because of this, I expect the company to crush analyst estimates when its next earnings report comes out.
As of this writing, Amazon stock is 16% off its recent high. It was brought down with the broader market turmoil. But it won’t stay down for long.
The biggest AI breakthrough yet…
I’m on record saying that artificial intelligence will be one of the most disruptive technologies of our lifetimes. And we know AI works. But there’s been one lingering concern.
For governments, companies, and even individuals to truly trust an AI, it helps to know what led an AI to its conclusion. In other words, how does an AI make decisions?
Now we just might have our answer to that question.
Google just released an open-source software library called Neural Tangents. This release makes an advanced form of AI, called infinite-width neural networks, available to anyone who wants to work with them. These are complex machine learning models that consider many different variables. The goal is to predict or optimize an outcome.
Historically, these models have required incredible amounts of computing power and took a lot of time to run. That made them too expensive and complex for most companies to use. With Neural Tangents, Google has changed that…
Neural Tangents makes it so anyone can run these models with just five lines of software code. Data scientists can simply provide the data sets that they want to analyze, specify the parameters, and run the software (AI). This simplifies the tech so we don’t have to be an expert to use it.
This release of open source software is yet another breakthrough in the industry. Google is democratizing access to very advanced artificial intelligence and making it available to the world for free.
Its previous release of TensorFlow, its open-source software for machine learning, back in November of 2015, transformed the industry. And just a few days ago, I wrote about the quantum version, TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ).
And what makes Neural Tangents so exciting is that it also provides insight into how an AI came to its conclusions.
This addresses one of the biggest issues with AI, the “how.” These additional insights will help us build better models, which will help us accelerate the pace of technological development even more.
So we will see Neural Tangents widely adopted throughout the industry this year. And that will lead to more developments and more breakthroughs. Just as I said in my 2020 prediction series, AI is going to have a profound impact on our world in 2020.
Regards,
Jeff Brown
Editor, The Bleeding Edge
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