I have a fun little secret to tell you. On the Mile High FI podcast that I cohost, Doug used Chat GPT to create a script for a small segment. Then he used Descript’s voice cloning to read the script in his voice. So part of the podcast in the clip below (starting at 2:20 and ending at 6:50) was completely generated with artificial intelligence (AI):
My Biggest Investing Takeaway For 2023 (and probably this decade)
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m obsessed with technology. I don’t pay attention to withdrawal rates because the future is going to to be great. And before you call me a foolish optimist, know that I’m a natural born pessimist. The reason I have the net worth that I do is because I was terrified of not having money, so I hoarded it.
2023 has been the year AI stormed into our lives. Chat GPT was released on 11/30/2022 and has been in the news ever since.
And did y’all see what NVIDIA did this year?
NVIDIA went bonkers because it makes the graphics processing units needed to train AI.
We’re only at the beginning, but already AI is part of our lives:
- Autonomous cars
- Internet search
- Data analysis
- Content generation
- Recommendation engines
- Chatbots
- Language translation
And we ain’t see nothing yet! The really big changes will come when AI starts to achieve high-level thinking abilities or General Intelligence. Once we can train computers to do our jobs, life will get really interesting.
Behind-The-Scenes AI Is Overlooked
Services like ChatGPT and Midjourney allow users to interact with AI directly. Perhaps the more interesting Ai story is when companies use it to make their products and services better. A really cool example is when Google used AI to improve Google Translate:
Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.
As of the previous weekend, Translate had been converted to an A.I.-based system for much of its traffic
The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime.
-Read the astonishing article here
What Does This Mean For Your Money?
VTSAX goes up and to the right mostly because of productivity increases. AI will be the biggest generator of productivity the world has seen. Us humans will have to figure out what to do once computers start taking our jobs. We’ll need smart leadership and the current lot (at least here in the ‘States) isn’t up to the task. In the meantime, there will be some missteps:
Misguided Chevy AI bots aside, AI is going to change our lives and our money.
Investing?
If you believe everything I’ve stated so far, your next question should be this:
How should I invest to take advantage?
One of Warren Buffett’s quotes comes to mind:
What you really should have done in 1905 or so, when you saw what was going to happen with the auto is you should have gone short horses. There were 20 million horses in 1900 and there’s about 4 million now. So it’s easy to figure out the losers, the loser is the horse. But the winner is the auto overall. 2000 companies (carmakers) just about failed.
There are early winners now in the AI race like NVIDIA, Google, and Microsoft, but new winners will emerge. It’s very difficult to predict who will be the big winners. Because of this, most of my money goes to boring old VTI* (VTSAX) which will hold all of the winners. However I also keep a much lesser amount of money in holdings that have concentrated positions in tech like QQQ and VGT. (See my portfolio here**.)
Finally, AI is a really great reason to pursue financial independence! That computer or robot can’t take your job if you don’t have one!
More 1500 Days!!!
You can also find me (and the dinosaurs) at:
Mile High FI podcast:
MindyOnMoney (new!) podcast!
Also here:
- Facebook: Facebook group and page
- YouTube: My channel is mostly devoted to home improvement, but I have some other material coming up soon too.
- Instagram: Pretty pictures of dinosaurs, sunsets, and nail guns!
- Twitter: Spontaneous, often insane, ramblings
- Coworking space: On the surface, MMM HQ is a coworking space. Look a little deeper and you’ll see that we’re really building community. The members of MMM HQ are some of the finest people I know
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*Note/ disclaimer/ lawyer bullshit: I have no credentials! I write for my own entertainment and this isn’t advice!
**Before I knew what index funds were, I picked stocks. You’ll still see many of them in my portfolio. I am slowly selling them off.
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*Only if your life is pretty bad to begin with.
Joseph Dain says
VAST Data. I had an interview with them and kinda glad it didnt work out after talking to others about the workload, but the upside this company has is insane. Its one to keep an eye one. They went from a 3B to 9B valuation this year.
VAST Data is a privately held technology company focused on artificial intelligence and deep learning computing infrastructure.
Mr. 1500 Days says
Never heard of it before now, but it’s on my list to look into. Thanks and Happy New Year!
Josh Epley says
I noticed the link for the new podcast, looking forward to hearing more!
Mr. 1500 Days says
Josh! How are you! I’m still waiting to go hiking with you!
Thanks for noticing the new podcast. We’ll start to publish episodes on 1/1.
wealthjourneycompass says
I’ve been working with some of the AI tools with my job recently, and what’s already out there, that most people don’t know about, is mind blowing.
Mr. 1500 Days says
I don’t think that most see what’s upon us. I just heard about this yesterday. And then I consider the possibilities of using CRISPR with AI. Many diseases could be cured in the next couple of decades.
Corwin says
Ha, I have the exact same thought when I hear about how AI is going to take away all the jobs – yet another great reason to pursue FI. (Even if I don’t think that’ll happen in my lifetime).
Why VTI instead of VTSAX? I’ve considered the pros and cons of each over the years, and I land on the side of VTSAX instead. I’m curious what made you go the VTI route.