We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI News Shaping Wall Street Today. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT) stands against the other AI stocks that are shaping Wall Street today.

In recent news reported by Reuters, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a Manhattan Project-style initiative to fund the development of AI systems that will be as smart, or even smarter, than humans. The proposition is amid the intensifying competition from China over advanced technologies.

“We’ve seen throughout history that countries that are first to exploit periods of rapid technological change can often cause shifts in the global balance of power. China is racing towards AGI … It’s critical that we take them extremely seriously”

– Jacob Helberg, a USCC commissioner told Reuters

Helberg, while recognizing that energy infrastructure is a significant bottleneck for training large AI models, suggests that streamlining the permitting process for data centers is one way of enabling a public-private partnership that could accelerate AI development.

READ ALSO: 15 AI News Making Waves Right Now and 10 AI News Investors Can’t Afford to Miss.

This news follows a rumor that artificial intelligence models are hitting a “wall”. Separate sources, including Reuters, The Information, and Bloomberg, have reported that companies such as OpenAI are failing in their next endeavors. Unnamed sources have claimed that OpenAI’s Orion is “so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI’s existing models as GPT-4 was from GPT-3.5.”

However, OpenAI is pushing back on these rumors, stating that there is “no wall”. Despite having not reached a wall, analysts do admit that it’s possible to have reached a turning point.

“We haven’t seen a breakthrough model in a while. Part of it is that we’ve exhausted all the human data, and so just throwing more compute at the same data may not yield better results.”

– Gil Luria, managing director at investment group D.A. Davidson

Gary Marcus, NYU professor emeritus and outspoken critic of AI hype, has this to say:

“The economics are likely to be grim. LLMs will not disappear, even if improvements diminish, but the economics will likely never make sense…”

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 74

Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT) develops, manufactures, markets, and services semiconductor wafer fabrication equipment and related spare parts for the worldwide semiconductor industry. Companies rely on Applied Material’s cutting-edge technology to build some of their most advanced semiconductors.

On November 18, Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT) announced that it will be expanding its global EPIC* (Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization) innovation platform, which was founded to network and grow international cybersecurity innovation ecosystems. The initiative was launched at a summit in Singapore, bringing together over two dozen R&D leaders from the semiconductor industry to foster alliances. The collaboration model is specifically designed to accelerate the commercialization of advanced chip packaging technologies. Known as the EPIC Advanced Packaging strategy, the expansion of Applied’s global EPIC platform aims to speed up the commercialization of energy-efficient computing solutions by offering leading chipmakers and system designers early access to next-generation technologies and equipment as well as deploying partnerships between equipment makers, material providers, device companies, and research institutes.

“Advanced packaging is paramount to the semiconductor roadmap for enabling sustainable progress in the AI era. Today’s summit unites the leaders from the most innovative organizations to explore collaborative advancements in performance-per-watt through advanced chip packaging. With our global innovation platform and the new EPIC Advanced Packaging strategy, Applied Materials is uniquely positioned to help chipmakers accelerate the journey from concept to commercialization of new technologies.”

-Dr. Prabu Raja, President of the Semiconductor Products Group at Applied Materials.

Overall, AMAT ranks 7th on our list of the AI stocks that are shaping Wall Street today. While we acknowledge the potential of AMAT as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than AMAT but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.