One of the worst performers on the market today has been the Appen Ltd (ASX: APX) share price.
At the time of writing the data solutions and services provider's shares are down 13% to $5.28.
Why have its shares sunk lower today?
With no news out of the company and no broker notes that I'm aware of, I can of course only speculate on the reason for today's sell off.
In my opinion the first potential catalyst for today's decline is profit taking.
Even after factoring in today's sizeable decline Appen's shares have almost doubled in value in just the last six months.
The second potential catalyst is a piece of news which broke a few days ago in the United States.
The artificial intelligence division of Google, DeepMind, unveiled an advanced system that has managed to accumulate thousands of years of human knowledge within days.
According to the paper published in Nature, AlphaGo Zero, as it is known, learned to play Go without the need to leverage enormous amounts of human expertise and data.
Lead AlphaGo researcher David Silver told Nature that: "The most important idea in AlphaGo Zero is that it learns completely tabula rasa — that means it starts from a blank slate and figures out for itself, only from self-play, without any human knowledge, any human data, without any human examples or features or intervention from humans."
It appears as though some investors are interpreting this as a major negative for Appen which provides data sets for machine learning activities.
If this technology can ultimately allow companies to bypass Appen, then a major source of revenue could be lost very quickly.
But it is early days and the computer program has only been used to master the game of Go. But no doubt investors will be keeping a close eye on AlphaGo Zero's development over the coming 12 months.
Should you buy the dip?
I would suggest that investors hold off an investment and let the dust settle. With the company's full-year results due early next year, hopefully management will provide an opinion on Alpha Go Zero and whether it believes it will impact the business.
