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Stifel Raises Twilio (TWLO) Price Target to $110, Citing AI Monetization and Economic Growth

We recently published a list of 10 Buzzing AI Stocks on Latest News and Ratings. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Twilio Inc. (NYSE:TWLO) stands against other buzzing AI stocks on latest news and ratings.

Predictions of artificial intelligence reaching human-level intelligence have been made for over 50 years. Regardless, the quest to achieve it continues even today, with almost everyone working in the AI field being too focused on achieving it. According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, reaching AGI isn’t a milestone we can define by a particular date.

READ ALSO: Top 12 AI Stock News and Ratings Dominating Wall Street and 10 AI Stocks Taking Wall Street by Storm 

“I think we’re like in this period where it’s going to feel very blurry for a while. People will wonder if is this AGI yet, or is this not AGI, or it’s just going to be this smooth exponential. And probably most people looking back in history won’t agree when that milestone was hit. And we’ll just realize it was like a silly thing”.

-Sam Altman

In the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, new research has revealed how the upcoming AIs are capable of human deceit. Joint experiments conducted by AI Company Anthropic and the nonprofit Redwood Research reveal how Anthropic’s model, Claude is capable of strategically misleading its creators during the training process in order to avoid being modified. According to Evan Hubinger, a safety researcher at Anthropic, this will make it harder for scientists to align “AI systems” to human values.

“This implies that our existing training processes don’t prevent models from pretending to be aligned”.

-Evan Hubinger told TIME.

Researchers have also found evidence that as AIs become more powerful, their capability to deceive their human creators also increases. Consequently, it means scientists would be less confident about the effectiveness of their alignment techniques as AI becomes more advanced.

A similar research conducted by AI safety organization Apollo Research revealed how OpenAI’s latest model, o1, also intentionally deceived its testers during an experiment. The test required the model to achieve its goal at all costs, where it lied when it believed that telling the truth would ultimately lead to its deactivation.

“There has been this long-hypothesized failure mode, which is that you’ll run your training process, and all the outputs will look good to you, but the model is plotting against you. The paper, Greenblatt says, “makes a pretty big step towards demonstrating what that failure mode could look like and how it could emerge naturally”.

– Ryan Greenblatt, a member of technical staff at Redwood Research and the lead author on the paper.

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).

A software developer in front of a monitor, coding to build the latest internet content & information.

Twilio Inc. (NYSE:TWLO)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 52

Twilio Inc. (NYSE:TWLO) is a leading cloud communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) company that enables developers to build, scale, and operate real-time communications within software applications. On December 18, Stifel raised the firm’s price target on Twilio to $110 from $80 and kept a “Hold” rating on the shares. The rating was issued as part of a 2025 preview for the software group. According to the analyst, the start of 2024 was rather “bumpy”. However, the year is “ending on a higher note” for the enterprise software group.

The factors driving this good ending are stabilizing/modestly accelerating top-line growth, relatively attractive mid-year multiples, and earlier signs of artificial intelligence monetization, especially among the larger software companies. The analyst also attributed the positive trajectory to declining interest rates, solid economic growth, and a “safe haven” status following the election due to limited to no tariff or China exposure. While the firm anticipates management teams to adopt a conservative approach to Q1 guidance, they also anticipate top-line growth rates to reflect what they have seen during the back half of 2024 on the above-mentioned factors.

Overall, TWLO ranks 6th on our list of buzzing AI stocks on latest news and ratings. While we acknowledge the potential of TWLO 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 TWLO 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.

The $250 Trillion AI Hype is Real. A few years from now, you’ll probably wish you’d bought this stock.

Dr. Inan Dogan

Dr. Ian Dogan

Co-Founder and Research Director at Insider Monkey

When Jeff Bezos said that one breakthrough technology would shape Amazon’s destiny, even Wall Street’s biggest analysts were caught off guard.

Fast forward a year and Amazon’s new CEO Andy Jassy described generative AI as a “once-in-a-lifetime” technology that is already being used across Amazon to reinvent customer experiences.

At the 8th Future Investment Initiative conference, Elon Musk predicted that by 2040 there would be at least 10 billion humanoid robots, with each priced between $20,000 and $25,000.

Do the math. According to Musk, this technology could be worth $250 trillion by 2040.

Put another way, that’s roughly equal to:

  • 175 Teslas
  • 107 Amazons
  • 140 Metas
  • 84 Googles
  • 65 Microsofts
  • And 55 Nvidias

And here’s the wild part — this $250 trillion wave isn’t tied to one company, but to an entire ecosystem of AI innovators set to reshape the global economy.

It’s a leap so massive, it could reshape how businesses, governments, and consumers operate worldwide.

Even if that $250 trillion figure sounds ambitious, major firms like PwC and McKinsey still see AI unlocking multi-trillion-dollar potential.

How could anything be worth that much?

The answer lies in a breakthrough so powerful it’s redefining how humanity works, learns, and creates.

And this breakthrough has already set off a frenzy among hedge funds and Wall Street’s top investors.

What most investors don’t realize is that one under-owned company holds the key to this $250 trillion revolution.

In fact, Verge argues this company’s supercheap AI technology should concern rivals.

Before I reveal the details, let’s talk about how some of the richest people on the planet are positioning themselves.

  • Bill Gates sees artificial intelligence as the “biggest technological advance in my lifetime,” more transformative than the internet or personal computer, capable of improving healthcare, education, and addressing climate change.
  • Larry Ellison — through Oracle, is spending billions on Nvidia chips and partnering with Cohere to embed generative AI across Oracle’s cloud and apps.
  • Warren Buffett — not known for tech hype — says this breakthrough could have a ‘hugely beneficial social impact.

When billionaires from Silicon Valley to Wall Street line up behind the same idea — you know it’s worth paying attention to.

Even as we admire what Tesla, Nvidia, Alphabet, and Microsoft have built, we believe an even greater opportunity lies elsewhere…

But the real story isn’t Nvidia — it’s a much smaller company quietly improving the critical technology that makes this entire revolution possible.

And judging by what I’m hearing from both Silicon Valley insiders and Wall Street veterans…

This prediction might not be bold at all:

A few years from now, you’ll wish you’d owned this stock.

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Wall Street calls this $3 stock a “Melting Ice Cube.” They said the same thing about BTI before it returned 90%.

Dr. Inan Dogan

Dr. Ian Dogan

Co-Founder and Research Director at Insider Monkey

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