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Comment by a_brawling_boo | Hacker News Reader

I came to see if people were talking about the robotics and automation ETF cited in the article and if it would be a good idea to buy at this point, but seems that everyone is having philosophical conversation instead of a investing conversation :-p

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The "problem" with that ETF is that there are few "pure play" intelligent robotic/automation companies in the world. There are manufacturing/farming equipment suppliers, consumer good robots doing fairly mundane tasks, chip makers who happen to make hardware that is good for AI.

From a clueless investor here, it seems like NVidia would be a good play if you anticipate widespread growth in machine learning.

GPUs are more useful than CPUs for ML, but eventually someone's going to want to cut nVidia out of that process: https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2017/05/an-in-depth-l...

nVidia is still a solid choice as VR has raised the visual fidelity demands for games and experiences, and even a 1080Ti can't render VR games at 90+FPS at max graphics. That's still a lot of demand nVidia has to meet.

Not sure if I'd want to chase Nvidia here, granted you could have said that 30% ago. I just don't see it as a sustained thing, because I believe FPGAs will eventually become the ML solution for giant corporations like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM etc. Couple that with Tesla ditching Nvidia on the self driving things...I think Nvidia's run is in its late stages. It's still a great company, with a great product, but I think more than ML right now, it is riding a bitcoin train. It's like a pair trade.

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