[darawk]

Betting on higher rates can be done using interest rate futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/interest-rates.html These are fairly complicated instruments though so you'll want to do a bit of reading in order to be sure you're making the bet you want to make.

Betting on AI is more complicated: Obviously chip makers are likely beneficiaries, along with tech giants, in particular Google via Deepmind appears to be a leader in this area. But there are other ways for this sort of thing to play out, a lot of companies HNers probably never think about are investing in AI automation for their factories and automation in various ways. One possible future is that Deepmind builds The General AI Solution, and then licenses it to everyone. Another possible future is that the tech becomes so easy to build that each company just builds its own tailored solution for its particular problem.

I think I find the latter solution somewhat more plausible, but both are definitely in play. How you invest to benefit from that is tricky. It's likely in that scenario that some big companies will develop solutions in house, and others will buy startups that you'll never have a chance to invest in. Your job as an investor at this stage would be to figure out which big companies that you can invest in are likely to be the ones who do this successfully.

And when I talk about big companies here I don't necessarily mean the big tech companies. I mean companies like Tyson that makes chicken, or chemical companies, or firms like Accenture, etc. This is the harder side of the bet, because it's going to play out over quite a while, and there is a lot of uncertainty about exactly how.

[deepsquirrelnet]

Moreso than AI, ML will continue to integrate into business and improve overall productivity. I don’t worry so much about monopolies in AI, because compared to the business solutions from ML — which are often much smaller, boutique models that perform more efficiently than large, general purpose models.

I believe the soon to be realized lesson is that solving one specific problem is significantly cheaper than trying to leverage much more expensive models built to solve a great many problems.

There’s still a lot of runway left in “small” models (eg BERT) that are still being researched and augmented to solve common business problems. 10 years from now, I believe some form of the current models will become industry standards as methods for solving specific problems.

[darawk]

Yep, I totally agree, as a median forecast. But the future is always uncertain, and it is possible the things we're seeing now will hit some sort of wall, where only large companies will be able to build highly general models and everyone else will be left licensing from them. I think that's unlikely, but I just wanted to enumerate it as a possibility. And when you're constructing portfolios for long time scales, you want to think about all the likely paths things might take and try to roughly assign a weight to them and construct your portfolio accordingly.