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Investing.com — Here are the biggest analyst moves in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) for this week.
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Morgan Stanley says Apple’s shift from EV to GenAI is a ‘positive development’
Bloomberg News reported earlier in the week that Apple (NASDAQ:) has halted work on its electric vehicle (EV), an initiative named Project Titan, which was started a decade ago.
The tech company announced this internally on Tuesday, taking the project’s nearly 2,000 employees by surprise.
Following the halt, many from the Special Projects Group (SPG) will now join Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector, led by executive John Giannandrea, to work on generative AI solutions, the report said.
Commenting on this development, Morgan Stanley said the reported news, if true, “would be a positive development” for the tech giant.
This is because the move “should allow the company to repurpose assets towards more important initiatives like Gen AI” and “shows relative cost discipline,” analysts led by Erik W. Woodring said in a note.
Dell reinstated as Top Pick at M. Stanley, PT hiked
Morgan Stanley analysts were impressed by Dell Technologies (NYSE:) latest quarterly report, with the company’s AI pipeline “tracking well ahead of” the investment giant’s previous expectations “and directionally closer to our bullish supply chain checks.”
“…DELL’s AI server commentary stole the show, as backlog nearly doubled Q/Q, orders grew ~40% Q/ Q, and pipeline ended the January quarter up Q/Q at “multiples of backlog”.
“These are all signs that support our bullish AI server supply chain checks, and show that DELL is a clear leader in the $72B AI hardware and services market,” analysts led by Erik W. Woodring wrote in a Friday note.
Moreover, Woodring found Dell’s guidance for the fiscal 2025 year conservative and believes there is further outperformance to capture in the stock.
Therefore, the analyst reiterated DELL as a Top Pick and hiked the price target from $100 to $128.
BofA raises Broadcom PT to $1,500
Broadcom (NASDAQ:) is set to announce its fiscal first quarter 2024 results after market close on Thursday, March 7th.
There’s a slightly heightened anticipation around the report, given that its stock has surged by 17% since the start of the year, outperforming the 12% gain seen in the SOX index, as the AI-driven market momentum continues.
In their preview of the report, Bank of America analysts led by Vivek Arya raised the target price on the stock from $1250 to $1500, implying over 7% upside from the current levels.
Although it’s possible that there could be volatility in Broadcom’s shares if the company’s FY2024 estimates remain largely unchanged, BofA expects “any stock pullback to be likely short-lived.”
This is because investors will be looking forward to Broadcom’s AI Investor Day on March 20, and will likely “continue to appreciate AVGO’s unique combination of capital appreciation, dividend yield/growth and its position as a “low beta” AI beneficiary.”
Wells Fargo downgrades HP Enterprise
Aaron Rakers, an equity analyst at Wells Fargo, downgraded Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:) from Overweight to Equal Weight and reduced the price target to $17 from $21.
“While we remain positive on HPE’s strategic/architectural positioning for the convergence of HPC and AI (e.g., large scale-out deployments leveraging proprietary Slingshot interconnect), the pace of revenue conversion & underlying EBIT% remain key questions,” he said in a note.
Furthermore, despite seeing Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Intelligent Edge as a long-term growth catalyst and a positive influence on margins, the expected normalization of growth is delayed due to extended periods of customer inventory adjustment, Rakers added.
Macquarie expecting high-profile AI failures in 2024
In a note to investors on Monday, Macquarie analysts predicted that 2024 might witness significant failures in generative AI technologies.
The broker highlighted several recent incidents in this field, including ChatGPT’s malfunction last week, where it produced illogical responses for several hours before OpenAI rectified the issue.
Moreover, they also pointed out criticism directed at Google’s (NASDAQ:) (NASDAQ:) Gemini project for generating historically inaccurate images, despite its focus on diversity.
“ChatGPT became temporarily unintelligible, and Google’s diversity-focused Gemini received criticism for historically inaccurate images,” said an analyst team led by Frederick Havemeyer.
“Questions are now mounting about whether AI vendors are in a position to revise history and create a post-truth internet,” they added.
Regulatory and AI alignment efforts aim to tackle emerging issues, yet incidents like Gemini’s inaccurate historical images highlight potential new challenges, said analysts.
Last week’s glitches reinforce Macquarie’s forecast of notable generative AI failures in 2024, especially as AI gains visibility during the election cycle.