Our early-adopters index examines how corporate America is deploying AI

Technology stocks are having a bumper year. Despite a recent wobble, the share price of the Big Five—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—has jumped by 60% since January, when measured in an equally weighted basket. The price of shares in one big chipmaker, Nvidia, has tripled and in another, AMD, almost doubled. Their price-to-earnings ratios (which measure how much the markets think a company is worth relative to its profits) are ten times that of the median firm in the s&p 500.

The main reason for the surge is the promise of artificial intelligence (AI). Since the launch in November of Chatgpt, an AI-powered chatbot, investors have grown ever more excited about a new wave of technology that can create human-like content, from poems and video footage to lines of code. This “generative AI” relies on large language models which are trained on big chunks of the internet. Many think the technology could reshape whole industries, and have as much impact on business and society as smartphones or cloud computing. Firms that can make the best use of the technology, the thinking goes, will be able to expand profit margins and gain market share.