Nike: Aliens, AI and a future market star?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

A 7'4" basketball playing alien wearing bright orange and white AI designed basketball sneakers doing a huge dunk over a bunch of small human players. Give it a Space Jam feel and vibe to the illustration.

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

Iconic brands now AI enhanced
Draining the world’s energy supplies one ChatGPT query at a time
Wolverine’s kicks

If that’s enough to get the aliens landing, read on…

AI Collision 💥

Images are everything in advertising. Iconic brands can be defined by the logo that represents them.

For example, if I show you the following logos, you know the brand before I even have to tell you what it is…

The 30 Most Important Nike Logos of All Time | Complex

What is somewhat rarer than iconic brand logos, is an iconic person logo. Or in most cases, an iconic logo that represents a player.

To mind, there’s maybe only two that fit this level of iconic-ness…

If by chance you don’t know those logos, the top one is Tiger Woods and the logo that represents his time with Nike (which has now ended, but that’s another story).

And the last one there is the “Jumpman” logo. It’s the logo that represents Michael Jordan and the Jordan brand within Nike.

But there’s another on the way, another that may end up as iconic as these logos, and maybe in time be up there with “Jumpman”.

It’s this…

Nike dropped this logo during the recent solar eclipse. It’s said to be the logo for NBA rookie and much-hyped future star Victor Wembanyama, or “Wemby” as many refer to him as.

Rumour has it Wemby signed a $100 million-plus, multi-year deal with Nike. Which also means, there’s going to be an entire range of Wemby shoes that Nike is going to drop sometime this year.

Back in 1985 Nike changed the entire market when it built a show specifically for Michael Jordan. The Air Jordan, also known as Jordan “1s”, became arguably the most famous and iconic sought-after shoe in history.

Thirty-nine years later and we may be on the cusp of another iconic name/brand shoe hitting the market with the “Wemby 1s”.

Now what’s all this got to do with AI?

Well Nike just released a whole bunch of prototype designs in Paris as part of its marketing push for its Olympic athletes.

The thing is, every image you’re about to see was designed in conjunction with the athlete… and AI.

Nike Unveils A.I. Driven Air Prototypes In Paris For Wemby, Sha’Carri Richardson, A’ja Wilson, & More

The most prominent one on display is the size 21 shoe for the 7ft 4in Wembanyama.

Nike’s press release explains:

In unskilled hands, AI can create designs that are full of generalities. But after listening to our athletes, we harness the conceptual power of AI and use it to get at the heart of what an athlete needs, creating a new working process. We can obsess over a product, and AI becomes a creative co-conspirator with us.

Nike (NYSE:NKE) is one of those iconic companies that is also a stock you can buy and invest in. It’s certainly had its struggles from time to time over the years. However, it’s clear its future will certainly look to tap into new technologies to not just help design new products, but to enhance the products it ends up making.

It’s not the first company you think of when you think AI, but it’s clear AI is on Nike’s radar and part of its long-term strategy. As Nike puts it:

The future of design at Nike is not its tools. It’s Nike’s relationship to its tools, and the bridge those tools build to deepen the relationship between athlete and designer.

AI-designed Wemby 1s (whatever the final design may be) may end up being as big for Nike as the start of the Jordan brand. Maybe, just maybe, it’s AI that helps Nike’s stock price head back higher and on to be a great stock to hold?

Time will tell, but at least this 50-year-old company is ready willing and able to innovate and adapt with the times. Which is exactly what you’d want to see from a company like this before you figure out whether to invest or not.

AI gone wild 🤪

9.66-times more energy draining than a simple Google search.

You might not think that a Google search would consume energy, but it does. Apparently it is 0.3 watt-hours of electricity.

So every time you go:

“Cat videos”…

“Cat on robot vacuum videos”…

“Two cats on robot vacuum videos”…

You’ve just soaked up 0.9 watt hours of the world’s energy.

But…

When you jump onto ChatGPT and you go:

“Explain the history of cat videos to me”…

“How do I teach my cat to ride a robot vacuum”…

“Explain to me how to get rich from my cat riding a vacuum video”…

Then you’re chewing up 8.7 watt-hours of energy. You are literally killing trees!

Ok, me too, but the point is the International Energy Agency reported, in January, that on average a typical Google search uses 0.3 watt-hours of electricity versus 2.9 watt-hours for a ChatGPT request. That is 9.66-times more energy thirsty than the regular Google search.

In short, an AI-enabled future is going to be fun, it’ll be useful, helpful, it is a levelling-up technology like no other in history. But it comes at a cost.

A big energy cost.

That’s not to say that we should outlaw AI because it will consume all the world’s energy stores. No, that’s just ridiculous. But it does mean we need to be much more forward-looking about where our energy will come from in the future to supply the increasing demand we put on AI and the increasing demand AI puts on the energy grid.

Speaking at an “Internet of Things” conference recently the CTO of Ceres Power (LSE:CWR), Caroline Hargrove said,

“What scares me is the energy consumption if you’re using ChatGPT,

“… as much as I’m a big fan in using the data to really optimize everything, we should use it to reduce our consumption, but the perverse effect can happen when you have a new toy and, and people getting behind it at [such] a rate.”

Of course I think there will be solutions to this problem. And we’re already starting to see the market wake up to that fact as well.

You only need to look at the price of uranium over the last 12 months to get an inkling towards what kind of energy source AI is going to rely heavily on in the future.

And funnily enough, Sam Altman, arguably the cause for a lot of this AI energy demand anxiety, might even be the one that has a solution to it all.

AI helping to fix the problem that AI sorted, someone poetic in nature even if slightly robotic in nature.

Needless to say, as I wrote last week when talking about the idea of data centre-as-a-chip, the idea of every “chip” coming with its own unique power source too is something I’m going to dive deeper into in the coming months.

Think of it like this…

If you open up your PC, you’ve got all the parts that make it work: the motherboard, CPU, GPU, fans (or liquid for cooling) hard drive, but you’ll also have a power supply. In this instance imagine a data centre that comes with its own power supply too, which plugs directly into it and doesn’t drain a single watt of energy from the grid, because it doesn’t need to.

That’s a big idea, one that requires policy change, and a lot of development. But I certainly think that’s the direction we are heading in, and that there will be a few companies to profit from it.

We’ll dive into those more in the coming weeks, but it’s certainly a wilder idea to keep back of mind for 2024 and beyond.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

man in black suit jacket and black pants figurine

Boom 📈

Appen (ASX:APX) up 29%
Bigtincan Holdings (ASX:BTH) up 17%
DotDigital Group (LSE:DOTD) up 10%

Bust 📉

iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) down 20%
Veritone (NASDAQ:VERI) down 30%
Gorilla Technology (NASDAQ:GRRR) down 34%

From the hive mind 🧠

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