Top 10 takeaways AI Index Report 2023.. Global AI private investment down for 1st time

18 / 11 / 2023

• news
• Sustainable Development

The Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023 – released by Stanford University – revealed that year-over-year global AI private investment has for the first time in the last decade went down to register  $91.9 billion in 2022, which represented a 26.7% decrease since 2021.

The total number of AI-related funding events as well as the number of newly funded AI companies likewise decreased.

However, during the last decade as a whole, AI investment has significantly increased. In 2022 the amount of private investment in AI was 18 times greater than it was in 2013.

The proportion of companies adopting AI in 2022 has more than doubled since 2017, though it has plateaued in recent years between 50% and 60%, according to the results of McKinsey’s annual research survey. Organizations that have adopted AI report realizing meaningful cost decreases and revenue increases.

The report said that industry races ahead of academia. Until 2014, most significant machine learning models were released by academia. Since then, industry has taken over. In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia. Building state-of-the-art AI systems increasingly requires large amounts of data, computer power, and money—resources that industry actors inherently possess in greater amounts compared to nonprofits and academia.

AI continued to post state-of-the-art results, but year-over-year improvement on many benchmarks continues to be marginal. Moreover, the speed at which benchmark saturation is being reached is increasing. However, new, more comprehensive benchmarking suites such as BIG-bench and HELM are being released.

The report added that AI is both helping and harming the environment. New research suggests that AI systems can have serious environmental impacts. According to Luccioni et al., 2022, BLOOM’s training run emitted 25 times more carbon than a single air traveler on a one-way trip from New York to San Francisco. Still, new reinforcement learning models like BCOOLER show that AI systems can be used to optimize energy usage.

As for scientific progress, AI models are starting to rapidly accelerate scientific progress and in 2022 were used to aid hydrogen fusion, improve the efficiency of matrix manipulation, and generate new antibodies.

The report also referred to the number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising. According to the AIAAIC database, which tracks incidents related to the ethical misuse of AI, the number of AI incidents and controversies has increased 26 times since 2012. Some notable incidents in 2022 included a deepfake video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy surrendering and U.S. prisons using call-monitoring technology on their inmates. This growth is evidence of both greater use of AI technologies and awareness of misuse possibilities.

The report added that the demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector. Across every sector in the United States for which there is data (with the exception of agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting), the number of AI-related job postings has increased on average from 1.7% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2022. Employers in the United States are increasingly looking for workers with AI-related skills.

The report highlighted that policymaker interest in AI is on the rise. An AI Index analysis of the legislative records of 127 countries shows that the number of bills containing “artificial intelligence” that were passed into law grew from just 1 in 2016 to 37 in 2022. An analysis of the parliamentary records on AI in 81 countries likewise shows that mentions of AI in global legislative proceedings have increased nearly 6.5 times since 2016.

The report noted that Chinese citizens are among those who feel the most positively about AI products and services. Americans … not so much. In a 2022 IPSOS survey, 78% of Chinese respondents (the highest proportion of surveyed countries) agreed with the statement that products and services using AI have more benefits than drawbacks. After Chinese respondents, those from Saudi Arabia (76%) and India (71%) felt the most positive about AI products. Only 35% of sampled Americans (among the lowest of surveyed countries) agreed that products and services using AI had more benefits than drawbacks.

AI has moved into its era of deployment; throughout 2022 and the beginning of 2023, new large-scale AI models have been released every month. These models, such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Whisper, and DALL-E 2, are capable of an increasingly broad range of tasks, from text manipulation and analysis, to image generation, to unprecedentedly good speech recognition. These systems demonstrate capabilities in question answering and the generation of text, image, and code unimagined a decade ago, and they outperform the state of the art on many benchmarks, old and new. However, they are prone to hallucination, routinely biased, and can be tricked into serving nefarious aims, highlighting the complicated ethical challenges associated with their deployment.

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence. The report’s mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The report aims to be the world’s most credible and authoritative source for data and insights about AI.

This year’s report measures and evaluates the rapid rate of AI advancement from research and development to technical performance and ethics, the economy and education, AI policy and governance, diversity, public opinion and more. The latest edition includes data from a broad set of academic, private, and non-profit organizations as well as more self-collected data and original analysis than any previous editions.