Nvidia, Meta Platforms boost ongoing AI enthusiasm

Interest in companies involved in artificial intelligence continued to make more headlines this week, with investors keying in especially on chipmaker Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).

No less than Nvidia (NVDA) Chief Executive Jensen Huang weighed in on AI by saying that artificial intelligence is at "an inflection point" and set to be one of Nvidia's (NVDA) leading sources of revenue and growth in the coming year.

The fact that Huang made his comments during a conference call to discuss Nvidia's (NVDA) fourth-quarter results and outlook wasn't lost on Wall Street. Investors sent Nvidia's (NVDA) shares up by 14% in response to Huang citing generating AI, along with gaming and data center strength as the main drivers of the company's upbeat performance and outlook.

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) wasn't going to let a week go by without making its presence in AI felt. On Friday, Meta (META) unveiled what it called the Large Language Model Meta AI--or, LLaMA, for short. Meta (META) said LLaMA is "a state-of-the-art foundational large language model designed to help researchers advance their work in this subfield of AI." The LLaMA is meant to be used for advancements in research as opposed to the conversational technologies led by ChatGPT.

C3.ai (AI), which, by virtue of having "AI" in its corporate name, announced an expansion of its AI agreements with Amazon Web Services (AMZN) by integrated applications such as C3 AI Law Enforcement, with AWS services.

Chinese e-commerce and Internet giant Baidu (BIDU) garnered attention as it said earlier in the week that it will begin to "fully integrate" its conversational AI chatbot across all of it corporate operations. The chatbot, called ERNIE, will be integrated into services such as Baidu's (BIDU) search and AI Cloud.

Meanwhile, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which has made waves with its multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, unveiled new AI-powered versions of the Bing search engine and Edge browser for Apple (AAPL) iOS and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android devices after earlier debuting web-based offerings of those services with AI included.