Guide:
The Pearl River gushes, day and night.
In the torrent of time, the wind is finally swept away, and only value is precipitated.
What is value? Capital gave it the basic definition of political economy: human labor condensed in commodities without distinction, while in the field of portfolio investment, value is usually the relationship between the intrinsic value of enterprises and the price given to them by the market.
Good companies need to build moats day by day, and good business needs to be tempered to form strong barriers. Good prices also need to wait for the moment in the volatility of the market. Behind value investment, there is a crystallization of time.
We invited the fund managers of GF Fund to share their understanding of time and thinking about value.
Let us, in the name of time, justify time.
Let's empower value in the name of value.
The Pearl River rolls, and a river of spring water flows east!
If Barbie is a little girl's favorite, then Transformers can be said to be a little boy's dream. The hard shape and iron will make Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and other robot characters deeply rooted in the childhood memories of many people. And with the advancement of technology, dreams are becoming reality step by step.
In fact, humanoid robots were studied earlier than Transformers. In the 60s of last century, Professor Ichiro Kato of Waseda University in Japan took the lead in solving the problem of bipedal walking of humanoid robots, which opened the prelude to the research of humanoid robots. Since 2010, the development of the Internet has promoted humanoid robots to gain more attention from the public: Boston Dynamics' Atlas parkour video received millions of likes as soon as it was released, and electric car giant Tesla launched a humanoid robot called "Optimus", which attracted market attention, a name that may be Musk's tribute to the Transformers classic.
The concept of "artificial intelligence (AI)" was first proposed at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, and since the beginning of this year, the AI frenzy triggered by ChatGPT is accelerating the change of the world, making 2023 the first year of general artificial intelligence (AGI).
General artificial intelligence means that artificial intelligence can be applied in different scenarios in all walks of life, and the most closely connected to our daily lives may be the concept of "embodied intelligence" proposed by NVIDIA Huang Jenxun, which is actually a close combination of artificial intelligence and robotics. We believe that humanoid robots may be the best embodiment of "embodied intelligence", and are expected to become the potential largest terminal application of general artificial intelligence, which is also expected to bring rich investment opportunities to the capital market.
AI brings "nonlinear" change and disruption
At the beginning of this year, ChatGPT took only two months from its release to more than 100 million users, creating the fastest speed in history with more than 100 million users. More importantly, ChatGPT seems to be about to unveil general artificial intelligence and show its power to humans.
ChatGPT's current function is to have a direct dialogue with users, and many common sense and even customized questions in daily life can give good answers, which is somewhat similar to search engines, but its ability to understand problems and reply quality far exceeds existing search engines. For ChatGPT, answering questions is a bit overkill, this product was originally invented to write code, and it is worth looking forward to more complex work in the future.
Looking back at the history of AI may help us better understand its current development and potential value. The development of artificial intelligence can be roughly divided into three stages: the first stage is the gestation stage of artificial intelligence in the last century; The second stage is the stage where artificial intelligence moves towards large models from 2018 to 2020; The third phase is now since 2021.
Currently, models are trained and fine-tuned under human supervision, and after the emergence of emerging capabilities, GPT-3.5 and ChatGPT were released in 2022, increasing the alignment of AI with human intent, allowing machines to better understand and execute human commands. Among them, GPT4 greatly increases the safety and accuracy of the answer, allowing longer inputs. More importantly, GPT launched the interface in April and May this year, trying to become a traffic portal and platform in the AGI era. You can think of this model as electricity generation, and after the invention of electricity, there were electrical appliances, electric vehicles, and these appliances were able to operate. In the future, the capabilities of artificial intelligence will also be like electricity, and its related capabilities will become more intelligent with the access of various applications. At this stage, under the flywheel effect of data interaction, general artificial intelligence has the opportunity to truly go to commercial use and achieve non-linear growth.
In addition, GPT4's multimodal capabilities are not yet officially available to the public, and OpenAI's latest conference demonstrates the ability to sketch web ideas and generate web pages directly from GPT. In the near future, this feature may be available, when artificial intelligence can read information other than text, helping users achieve richer and more valuable functions.
Imagine the future, general artificial intelligence will be applied to different scenarios in all walks of life, such as office, scientific research and even art creation scenes that have been practiced to a certain extent, and industrial, medical and even military scenes that are still being planned There will also be many application opportunities.
Take our more optimistic robot as an example, it involves R&D design, parts manufacturing, system integration, software programming, service provision and other links. This industry chain can provide opportunities for many enterprises, such as semiconductor companies, robot manufacturers, AI companies, cloud service providers, etc., which we believe are more important beneficiary industries and directions. In general, the "nonlinear" changes and subversions brought by new technologies to human society are worth looking forward to.
Robots or the largest end applications
Recently, humanoid robots with high market attention may be the most common application form in the future robot industry, and are expected to become the largest terminal application of general artificial intelligence. The combination of ChatGPT large model and robot can be understood as: the robot manufacturing company completes the construction of hardware architecture and realizes the functions of motor control such as cerebellum, trunk, and limbs, while the emergence of ChatGPT realizes the function of "brain". As a result, the prototype of the humanoid robot is basically complete, and the foundation of iteration is available.
First of all, why emphasize the "human form"? Robots can be like dogs, cats, service robots, food delivery robots, and delivery robots in hotels and restaurants. But humanoid robots are from the needs of people, interact with people, accompany, meet the needs of people is the most likely to play its benefits, just as taxis, subways, table heights, etc. are designed from a human point of view, in order to increase the versatility of robots, humanoid design is the most direct idea. In the past few decades, science fiction movies have also created many humanoid robots, providing everyone with a vision and prospect for the future.
The research of humanoid robots began in the 60s of the 20th century, and Waseda University in Japan took the lead in solving the bipedal walking problem of humanoid robots, which opened the prelude to the research of humanoid robots. After entering the 1990s, humanoid robots have developed rapidly on the basis of continuous changes in control methods and hardware technologies, and since then, the walking ability and functionality of robots have become more and more powerful.
Since 2010, the development of the Internet has attracted more attention to humanoid robots, and technology has continued to be iteratively upgraded: in 2015, the commercial sale of SoftBank Pepper was a major attempt for humanoid robots to enter the mass market, in 2021, Boston Dynamics' Atlas parkour video received millions of likes as soon as it was released, and electric vehicle giant Tesla also announced in 2021 that it would launch a humanoid robot product "Optimus", and AI in 2022 Day showed off the prototype.
At present, the state attaches great importance to the development of robots, and recently, both the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and local government departments are intensively issuing "robot +" policy documents to support robot research and development and subsidize eligible companies.
From the current analysis, humanoid robots have a huge potential market space, the final game or dozens of times the size of the automobile market. According to Goldman Sachs' latest forecast, in an optimistic state, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of humanoid robot sales from 2025 to 2035 can reach about 94%; If we refer to the global development history of electric vehicles and smartphones, Neutral expects that the CAGR of humanoid robot sales from 2025 to 2035 will be about 40%. In other words, this is in line with the characteristics of an industry with large space and fast growth. Generally speaking, an industry can grow at an annualized rate of 30%, which is a very good growth industry, and humanoid robots are likely to bring rich investment opportunities to the capital market in the next few years.
In addition, according to Tesla's 2023 investor conference, Musk expects that if Optimus reaches a mature state of use, the final number may reach more than 10 billion units, and the market size is optimistically estimated to be 100 times the size of the automotive market based on its selling price. Of course, robots other than humanoids are expected to usher in rapid development in the era of general artificial intelligence.
Share opportunities for humanoid robot hardware innovation
If the humanoid robot can land smoothly and increase the volume, the potential market space in the future will be very considerable. It may be the biggest technological hardware innovation after smartphones and electric vehicles. Chinese companies are also expected to share the growth feast of humanoid robots.
Analysis of the industrial chain shows that the humanoid robot industry chain has a certain degree of overlap with industrial robots and the automotive industry, but there are some differences in downstream application scenarios. For example, humanoid robots involve joint actuators like industrial robots, but the structure is more complex, in addition to vision sensors, force sensors, power batteries, interactive equipment, etc., some parts can be found on industrial robots. The difference is that most of the application scenarios of industrial robots are closed factory sites, while humanoid robots involve the processing of various complex scenes, so they require both strong motion control capabilities, powerful perception calculations and execution capabilities according to environmental feedback, which is a very big test for motion control algorithms and autonomous decision-making capabilities.
Taking the Tesla humanoid robot as a sample, we estimate that more than 70% of the hardware cost of the Tesla humanoid robot configuration comes from joints (rotary joints, linear joints, hand joints). "Made in China" has proved its strong mass production and cost reduction capabilities and the reliability of supply chain delivery in the past two iconic products of smart phones and electric vehicles, and if the humanoid robot product is recognized by the market in the future, China's supply chain will not be absent.
Specifically, we believe that Tesla will most likely share its mature electric vehicle supply chain with humanoid robots in the future, and the power battery, thermal management system, structural parts, and some sensors used in electric vehicles can be used for humanoid robots, although the components on the prototype are still a large number of products from overseas suppliers, but once the future enters the mass production stage, the main force of cost reduction lies in Chinese suppliers.
So, projected into the capital market, how to lay out the investment opportunities of humanoid robots? With our research experience, combined with the development trend of the industry, grasping the growth cycle is a more effective method.
The Gartner curve provides a good paradigm for investing in technology growth stocks: humanoid robots are currently in the early stage of the technology curve - the embryonic period of technology to the period of expectation inflation, often the stage of unlimited hope for the future of a new technology, reflected in the price of related assets, mainly based on various assumptions and industry chain evidence valuation increase, that is, from 0 to 1 process. But if there is no performance support brought by product mass production in the short and medium term, the bursting of the valuation bubble is an inevitable process, and then the product may continue to iterate, when the iteration touches the stage of the "sweet spot" of the market, it is a rapid increase in volume, and the industrial chain enters a boom period from 1 to N.
From an investment point of view, the opportunity for asset prices to rise brought about by such exciting technological innovation is often in the early stage of product volume preparation. Therefore, we conduct in-depth research and close follow-up now, in order to be able to share as many investment opportunities as possible at different stages of the industrial development process.
(Risk Warning: The views and judgments contained in this article are solely those of the investment manager.) This article is for communication purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice. Investment is risky and you must be cautious when entering the market. ）