What a time to be alive…
I know there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there.
And I get it.
We’ve just been through the worst bout of inflation since the 1970s… and the worst bear market since 2008.
Wars are raging in Ukraine and Israel.
And to call the U.S. political system dysfunctional is being kind to the folks in Washington.
But it’s not all bad news…
As I’ve been charting for you in these pages, we’re also embarking on the most exciting technological journey in history – the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Most of the media’s attention has been on the rollout of consumer-focused AI chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s new AI-powered Bing search engine.
These are powerful new tools for searching the Web.
They can also write essays… brainstorm ideas for baby names… and debug computer code.
But this only scratches the surface of what AIs can do.
What’s less well understood is the role these thinking machines can play in 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.
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.
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.
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
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
