‘AI is Toronto's hidden opportunity:' Experts discuss how AI will reshape the workplace and transform Canadian industries
Avi Goldfarb, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Health Care, Joyce Drohan, Ontario's first Chief AI and Technology Officer, and Daniel Wigdor, co-founder and CEO of AXL, discussed how AI will reshape the workplace and the economy during a panel moderated by Toronto Star Editor-in-Chief Nicole MacIntyre at the city's Design Exchange on June 25.
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Globe and Mail
2 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
If I Could Load Up on Any Artificial Intelligence (AI) Stock, It Would Be This One (Hint: It's Not Nvidia)
Key Points Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) produces the vast majority of all high-performance AI chips. High-performance chips (which include AI chips) accounted for 59% of TSMC's total revenue in the first quarter of 2025. TSMC has been expanding its manufacturing operations to different countries outside of Taiwan. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for a while, but it gained mainstream popularity in early 2023 due to the rise of generative AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet' s Google Gemini. Plenty of tech stocks have seen their valuations skyrocket because of the AI boom, but the biggest beneficiary has undoubtedly been Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Over the past three years, its stock has increased by nearly 920%, while the S&P 500 has risen around 64% over the same period. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » Nvidia has gotten a lot of attention, and rightfully so. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) and AI software are very important to the AI ecosystem. However, there's another company that Nvidia relies on heavily that's just as important, and it's a stock I'm loading up on: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM) (TSMC). TSMC's role in the AI pipeline At first glance, calling a manufacturing company like TSMC an AI stock might seem unusual, but it's a pivotal player in how the technology all comes together. Let's take a look at how its business works. TSMC is the world's largest semiconductor (chip) manufacturer and the pioneer of the foundry business model. You can't buy TSMC chips in a store or online like a smartphone or laptop. Instead, companies go to TSMC with their chip designs, and it manufactures them, bringing those designs to life. For example, it makes chips for Apple 's iPhones, Tesla 's self-driving technology, AMD 's processors, Nvidia's GPUs, and plenty of other applications. TSMC's relationship with Nvidia and other AI-chip designers is why I'm willing to consider it an "AI stock," even as a chip manufacturing company. In fact, TSMC manufactures the vast majority of all high-performance AI chips, so there's a strong case to be made that without the company and its capabilities, the AI landscape would look significantly different -- for the worse. Money coming in to back up the hype The increased demand for AI chips is showing up in TSMC's financials. In the first quarter, its revenue increased 35% year over year to $25.5 billion. It expects its Q2 revenue to come in between $28.4 billion and $29.2 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 36% to 40%. That's impressive for a company of TSMC's size. Data by YCharts. Just three years ago, in Q1 2022, smartphone chips accounted for 40% of TSMC's revenue, while high-performance chips (HPCs), which include AI chips, accounted for 41%. Fast-forward to Q1 this year, and HPCs accounted for 59% of revenue, while smartphones accounted for only 28%. This shift in the composition of the company's top line isn't showing any signs of slowing down. Play the long game One of the risks facing TSMC's business is the geopolitical tension between Taiwan and China. However, management is working to address this concern by expanding its operations globally. TSMC currently has (or will have soon) manufacturing plants in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. This can help reduce some of its geographical risk. There's a reason so many of the world's top companies rely heavily on TSMC -- it's the best at what it does. Having the most technologically advanced foundries and a large customer base that often signs long-term contracts puts TSMC in a position to have consistent and reliable growth for quite some time. Trading at 28.9 times trailing earnings as of this writing, TSMC stock isn't "cheap" by most standards, but it's less expensive than other well-known AI stocks like Nvidia and Broadcom. And in this case, it's worth paying the slight premium for this undisputed industry leader, especially if you're looking for a long-term buy-and-hold position. Should you invest $1,000 in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing right now? Before you buy stock in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $699,558!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $976,677!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is1,060% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to180%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. *Stock Advisor returns as of June 30, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Stefon Walters has positions in Apple and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Advanced Micro Devices, Alphabet, Apple, Nvidia, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, and Tesla. The Motley Fool recommends Broadcom. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
National Post
6 hours ago
- National Post
Chris Selley: We aren't slaves to AI, unless we want to be
Article content Immediate disbarment seems much more appropriate to me for any lawyer caught faking precedent — AI-generated or otherwise — but ChatGPT tells me that's unreasonable. Someday, though, presumably, this is going to lead to a truly disastrous outcome. That goes for every profession, not just the law. Article content I have a suspicion — or maybe it's more of a hope — that in 25 years we'll look back on the AI craze and chuckle at our own gullibility. It's not that it's useless; Google's AI-generated search results are a hell of a lot more useful than its actual search engine, if only because Google seems intent on making its actual search engine non-functional. AI can provide interesting information and answers — but then, and this is critical, you have to actually check that they're accurate. Article content That's assuming, of course, that we still know how to think for ourselves in 25 years. The stories you hear out of the education world about students relying on AI for their work — and struggling in vain to perform without it — are downright dystopian. Article content Article content Tales abound of students using AI to generate entire essays, and I often detect a tone of hopelessness among teachers and professors lamenting it. At the high-school level, I've heard stories of parents going to the wall to protect their kids who've been caught plagiarizing — and of teachers basically giving up the fight, because unlike traditional plagiarism, it can be difficult to prove conclusively that something is AI-generated. ChatGPT doesn't always give the same answers to the same questions, which sounds to me more like a bug than a feature … unless you're looking to plagiarize an essay, of course. Article content (I'm amused to see that Grammarly, the website that allowed an entire generation to opt out of learning how to write an English sentence, now provides a service that will flag AI-generated text. Pick a lane, fellas!) Article content The frustrating thing is, it's not remotely difficult to detect AI-generated text qualitatively once you're familiar with it. It is absolute trash, always, and immediately recognizable to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention: unrelentingly bland, often repetitive, punctuated by weird verbs and jarring turns of phrase. Teachers in particular, who will (hopefully!) know how a student actually writes, will take notice when that student submits something completely out of character. Article content 'Beyond a reasonable doubt' shouldn't be the standard for implementing academic sanctions. But if flagging AI plagiarism is too much too ask, there is a very easy solution: In-person, handwritten exams. Schools and individual teachers and professors are increasingly resorting to that — and finding that many of their students have no idea how to write, both structurally and in terms of penmanship. Article content
Globe and Mail
7 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Will Palantir Be a $1 Trillion Company by 2035?
Key Points Palantir's growth in the government sector has been outstanding. The company could receive a significant boost from growing European demand for artificial intelligence (AI). However, the stock's valuation has become excessively high. Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) has been one of the top-performing stocks since the start of 2024, rising nearly 700%. It has also been a top performer in 2025, rising 80% so far. Palantir's business has been booming alongside the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race. With no signs of AI spending slowing down, investors are speculating that Palantir's stock could eventually reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. Palantir's current valuation hovers around $320 billion, so the stock would need to more than triple to cross that threshold. But can that happen over the next decade? Palantir is seeing phenomenal growth in multiple sectors Palantir offers AI-powered data analytics solutions that help decision makers make the best choice possible. Originally, Palantir began with government clients, but it has also expanded into the commercial sector over the past few years. Although commercial revenue has grown significantly, government revenue still makes up the majority of Palantir's total revenue. In Q1, government revenue was $487 million, and on the commercial side, it was $397 million. Government revenue is also rapidly increasing, rising 45% year over year. The U.S. government increased at the same rate as international, indicating widespread adoption of Palantir's products worldwide. However, that story is completely different on the commercial side. U.S. commercial revenue rose 71% year over year in Q1, while overall commercial revenue rose 33%. This indicates global AI adoption (specifically in Europe) lags the U.S., but that story could change over the next few years. That could rapidly accelerate and cause Palantir's impressive 39% growth rate to rise even further. Palantir bulls point to this as a reason why the stock could reach a $1 trillion valuation by 2035. However, the bears have another key point to consider, and it could derail the entire investment thesis. Palantir's stock is overvalued One thing that should raise a red flag for investors with Palantir's stock is its 700% rise alongside its 39% growth rate. Those two figures are completely mismatched, indicating that Palantir's stock might be overvalued. After evaluating Palantir's price-to-sales valuation, this fact is confirmed. PLTR PS Ratio data by YCharts Most software companies trade at a multiple of 10 to 20 times sales. The best companies with rapid growth rates can trade upwards of 30 times sales. However, Palantir's stock is more than three times that level. Achieving nearly 110 times sales is practically unheard of in the stock market, and if a stock ever reaches that valuation, it usually only does so when it's doubling or tripling its revenue year over year. Even then, some of those companies crash from a high valuation. Even if Palantir gets a boost from rising European revenue, I don't think it's going to be enough to propel its stock to a reasonable level. Multiple years of revenue growth are already baked into the stock price. For Palantir to achieve a still very expensive but far more reasonable price tag of 30 times sales, it would require 363% revenue growth from today's levels. As a result, I don't think Palantir can triple its stock price over the next decade because it's going to spend the first part of it growing into the extremely high valuation it has now. Investors need to be cautious because high expectations are already baked into the stock price; any misstep could cause the stock to tumble back to reality. Should you invest $1,000 in Palantir Technologies right now? Before you buy stock in Palantir Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Palantir Technologies wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $699,558!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $976,677!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is1,060% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to180%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 30, 2025
