A member of the Magnificent Seven grouping of tech stocks, Nvidia (NVDA) is, by many standards, ahead of the curve in hardware, software, and AI technology. As investment into artificial intelligence continues to pour in at competitors like Intel (INTL) or Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is it enough for these companies to catch up or even stand in the way of Nvidia's dominance?

Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley joins the Live show as part of Yahoo Finance's special AI Revolution coverage this week, to discuss all things AI, starting with Nvidia's spot at the top, which competitor is making gains, and where the AI race will go moving forward.

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Nicholas Jacobino

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: All right. Well, we want to get to one of the big themes here at Yahoo Finance, and that is AI. Certainly has been driving the market's momentum as of lately, and you have to look no further than NVIDIA. This stock has certainly been a standout so far this year, and especially looking at that one-year chart where shares up just about 250%. So what company, could a company potentially derail some of the rally, some of the momentum that we're seeing in NVIDIA? And for that, we want to bring in Dan Howley, our Tech Editor, who has closely been tracking what has turned out to be a phenomenal story right now for the markets, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. NVIDIA, basically, is just, you know, the AI King, right? And they have been for quite some time. I think, you know, this is something that years ago when they first started investing in AI, the idea was they just went to universities and said, you know, what can you guys do with these powerful graphics processors that we have. And AI happen to be one of the things that came up. And so, you know, they began investing, companies thought that they were crazy and their own backers thought that they were crazy. They were like, why are you dumping so much money into this? It's paying off huge, right?

They eclipsed the $1 trillion mark as far as market cap goes in June. And they were closing on a $1.5 trillion as of Friday. But there are some rivals out there. And I just want to go over a few of them here. The big ones really are AMD, which has been kind of a longtime thorn in their side, and Intel, surprisingly, 0 Intel. And I say surprisingly only because they haven't done as well in the graphics card space at all. And so when you look at what Intel and AMD are doing, right now NVIDIA's best chip is the H100, AMD has the MI300, which they announced in December.

Intel is working on their Gouty AI Accelerator. Those are going to be potential options that companies can use in place of NVIDIA's offerings. Now, it's important to note that NVIDIA, they are the leader when it comes to hardware. They're miles ahead of everyone else. It's going to take years for other companies to catch up. But on the software side, they're also huge. That's a big moat for them where they have this Cuda software where companies can go out and build their own kind of AI platforms around this. And so that helps keep people wrapped into the NVIDIA system.

So it's a big deal here. Hyperscalers also have their own chips that they're making that could also prove troublesome for NVIDIA.

BRAD SMITH: Right. And, Dan, I mean, we talk about AI all the time as this broad concept that is going to certainly revolutionize change tech forever. Can you tell us, though, exactly how consumers can use AI right now? Where is it present in my fingertips even.

DAN HOWLEY: So right now-- it's funny. If you ask Intel, right, they announced this event, they had this AI everywhere event, and they have new chips where they have NPU, Neural Processing Units. Those have been in the iPhone for a long time, right? Neural Processing Engine. So now they're in Intel chips, they're in AMD chips, they're in Qualcomm chips. So they're coming to they're coming to laptops, desktops, they're coming to smartphones now. The new Samsung phone, the Galaxy 24, as well as Google's Pixel has them. You can expect Apple probably to get on the train more with generative AI.

If you ask Intel what that means, though, they literally say we don't know right now, we don't know yet. Developers have to come out with apps that take advantage of this. But there are some ways that you can take advantage of it. When you use your laptop or desktop, you can run generative AI apps on there. So if you want to do some generative AI with images or with text, the idea is that you would be able then to do it all locally, that means more security, more privacy since you're not sending your data up to the cloud. It's all on device. That's with the laptop and desktop. Microsoft is doing that.

On the phone with Samsung or Google, there's image generative AI, where you can change around some photos. I can make myself look like I can slam dunk. I cannot. I can't--

BRAD SMITH: You told me you could.

DAN HOWLEY: Well, yeah. That was a lie. So there goes all my integrity. But I can jump like an inch maybe, but I can make it look like I'm a monster.

SEANA SMITH: Jump an inch.

BRAD SMITH: Yeah.

DAN HOWLEY: I got weak ankles, weak ankles.

BRAD SMITH: Well, thanks to generative AI, you can jump much higher, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: I can live my dream.

BRAD SMITH: Yes.