By Jack Purich, Managing Director, Balancing Portfolio Implementation Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the way the global economy works and how many businesses generate profits. As a result, markets have reacted with a flurry of excitement to recent AI breakthroughs and seem to have already picked the “winners” of AI. This group of technology giants—nicknamed The Magnificent Seven—include Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Together, they’ve outperformed global equity markets by a stunning 200% over the past five years. In the process, they’ve also become quite expensive compared to trailing earnings (at an average price/earnings ratio of 53x). Given the large technology and data platforms they possess, declaring The Magnificent Seven to be the “winners” of the AI race seems reasonable. But let’s not pretend markets are always right. In the late 1990s, markets were enthralled with another emergent technology with the power to revolutionize the economy—the Internet. An early set of “winners” were selected back then too—names like AOL, Nokia, Microsoft, Cisco and Sun Microsystems. Some of those companies flourished (especially Microsoft). But ultimately, it was a set of smaller players, like Apple and Google, or companies that didn’t yet exist, like Facebook, who came out on top.  For long-term investors, the question is: will history repeat itself or will this time be different? 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