Welcome to the era of stock-picking AI chatbots

Shares of Lucid vaulted briefly on Tuesday afternoon following the company’s announcement that it will team up with Nvidia to bring Level 4 autonomous driving to its future vehicles.

A still-unnamed midsized SUV by Lucid, planned for 2026, will feature lidar and radar provided by Nvidia’s ecosystem. Ultimately, the automaker said it aims to create the “first true eyes-off, hands-off, and mind-off (L4) consumer owned autonomous vehicle.” Level 4 autonomous vehicles, like Waymo’s robotaxis, operate without human intervention.

The Nvidia partnership will also bring new automated features to Lucid’s Gravity SUV, the luxury EV maker said. Its shares rose more than 6% before losing all those gains and dipping into the red.

Lucid and Nvidia’s announcements came along with a host of other new partnerships at the chip designer’s GTC in Washington DC.

Eli Lilly is partnering with Nvidia to build "the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company" to help discover new medicines.

The drugmaker announced the deal on Tuesday, following a slew of deals Nvidia announced with other companies. Lilly did not specify the terms of the deal but did say it is using 1,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Lilly — the maker of the blockbuster diabetes and weight loss shots, Mounjaro and Zepbound — said the supercomputer "will help scientists identify, optimize and validate new molecules."

"With purpose-built AI models and AI, we can set a new scientific standard that accelerates innovation to deliver medicines to more patients, faster," Diogo Rau, Lilly's chief information and digital officer said in a statement.

Quantum computing stocks Rigetti Computing, IonQ, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantum Computing initially popped when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new architecture called NVQLink to connect quantum computers with GPU supercomputers to aid in error correction, calibration, control, and simulations.

“Working together, the right algorithms running on the GPUs, the right algorithms running on the QPUs, and the two computers working side-by-side. This is the future of quantum computing,” Huang said.

Two of these stocks, Rigetti Computing and IonQ, were listed as “partners contributing” to this new tech in a press release.

However, the stocks then all reversed course to tumble into the red when Huang said, “Today, we’re announcing that the Department of Energy is partnering with Nvidia to build seven new AI supercomputers to advance our nation’s science.”

There may be some conflation of “AI supercomputer” and “quantum computer” going on here. This is not necessarily a competing product, but rather two things that are supposed to work hand-in-hand!

“It’s surprising to see the misread here,” said David Williams, who covers quantum computing stocks as an analyst at Benchmark Co. “This should be a positive, the ability for QPUs and GPUs to work together.”

He also flagged how Huang’s remarks from earlier this year about the timeline for quantum computers to be “very useful” prompted a nosedive in pure-play stocks across the industry — comments that were later walked back as those stocks recovered.

As previously discussed, quantum computing stocks spent many a day in recent months going up (often on no news at all!), and now appear to have gone down based on a seemingly imperfect interpretation of what appears on the surface to be fairly good news. And it’s noteworthy in and of itself that there seems to be a bit of a vibe shift, with traders looking for excuses to sell after having spent a long time looking for any excuse to buy.