Emerging markets
Emerging markets and trends are critical to follow for investment purposes.
Generative AI
Advanced generative AI is being adopted more and more for essays, artwork, and even coding.
Almost every other day, there is some art or academic use case getting disrupted by the technology, although often it is interesting and not particularly practical.
Law education: https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/22/scores-of-stanford-students-used-chatgpt-on-final-exams-survey-suggests/
Generative AI is efficient to use and trendy, making it a very fast-growing tool for automation.
The profitability of generative AI might come from existing service/product margins or brand new companies.
It also seems to be the case that top tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. are all competing for dominance in this “AI chatbot war” started by ChatGPT.
State of the art LLMs are available, but often the training process and high operating expenses required from companies like OpenAI make chatbots largely inaccessible to the general public.
It will be interesting to see whether Generative AI bring can truly bring enough productivity and profit to justify the costs of powerful hardware. With the right balance of cost and results, I think real value can be unlocked from advanced automation possibilities. Custom, efficient hardware is becoming increasingly important for training and inference. Companies like Google with Cloud TPU offerings already can make money renting out their hardware as a service.
Electric Vehicles
Electric vehicles are in full swing, with many local and federal governments pushing for EV adoption.
EVs as a technology make a lot of sense, with only a few downsides such as range and charge time. Inevitable improvements in range will make EVs highly desirable for environmental purposes.
Traditional car manufacturers are all clamoring for market share in this highly profitable domain.
Tesla and Rivian are the newest contenders, but they seem to be gaining significant market share in their respective customer segments in electric trucks and electric sedans.
It will be interesting to compare offerings from traditional manufacturers versus newcomers, with each company having their advantages and disavantages.
In the end, I believe the most reliable product will prevail.
Other
I don’t know of any others at the moment, but I will update this post if I find any.