Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2023 by Stanford University - Top Ten Takeaways

The AI Index Report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence.?

1. Industry races ahead of academia.
2. Performance saturation on traditional benchmarks.
3. AI is both helping and harming the environment.?
4. The world’s best new scientist … AI?
5. The number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising.
6. The demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector.
7. For the first time in the last decade, year-over-year private investment in AI decreased.?
8. While the proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, the companies that have adopted AI continue to pull ahead.
9. Policymaker interest in AI is on the rise.
10. Chinese citizens are among those who feel the most positively about AI products and services. Americans … not so much.

Download the 386-page Stanford report

AI research is on the rise, across the board. The total number of AI publications has more than doubled since 2010. The specific AI topics that continue to dominate research include pattern recognition, machine learning, and computer vision.

China continues to lead in total AI journal, conference, and repository publications. The United States is still ahead in terms of AI conference and repository citations, but those leads are slowly eroding. Still, the majority of the world’s large language and multimodal models (54% in 2022) are produced by American institutions.

2022 saw the release of text-to-image models like DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, text-to-video systems like Make-A-Video, and chatbots like ChatGPT. Still, these systems can be prone to hallucination, confidently outputting incoherent or untrue responses, making it hard to rely on them for critical applications. Language models continued to improve their generative capabilities, but new research suggests that they still struggle with complex planning tasks.

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.

Automated fact-checking with natural language processing isn’t so straightforward after all. While several benchmarks have been developed for automated fact-checking, researchers find that 11 of 16 of such datasets rely on evidence “leaked” from fact-checking reports which did not exist at the time of the claim surfacing.

Once again, the United States leads in investment in AI. The U.S. led the world in terms of total amount of AI private investment. In 2022, the $47.4 billion invested in the U.S. was roughly 3.5 times the amount invested in the next highest country, China ($13.4 billion). The U.S. also continues to lead in terms of total number of newly funded AI companies, seeing 1.9 times more than the European Union and the United Kingdom combined, and 3.4 times more than China.

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.

New AI PhDs increasingly head to industry. In 2011, roughly the same proportion of new AI PhD graduates took jobs in industry (40.9%) as opposed to academia (41.6%). Since then, however, a majority of AI PhDs have headed to industry. In 2021, 65.4% of AI PhDs took jobs in industry, more than double the 28.2% who took jobs in academia.

When it comes to AI, policymakers have a lot of thoughts. A qualitative analysis of the parliamentary proceedings of a diverse group of nations reveals that policymakers think about AI from a wide range of perspectives. For example, in 2022, legislators in the United Kingdom discussed the risks of AI-led automation; those in Japan considered the necessity of safeguarding human rights in the face of AI; and those in Zambia looked at the possibility of using AI for weather forecasting.

AI systems are increasingly deployed in the real world. However, there often exists a disparity between the individuals who develop AI and those who use AI. North American AI researchers and practitioners in both industry and academia are predominantly white and male. This lack of diversity can lead to harms, among them the reinforcement of existing societal inequalities and bias.

Among a sample of surveyed Americans, those who report feeling excited about AI are most excited about the potential to make life and society better (31%) and to save time and make things more efficient (13%). Those who report feeling more concerned worry about the loss of human jobs (19%); surveillance, hacking, and digital privacy (16%); and the lack of human connection (12%). AI has the potential to have a transformative impact on society. As such it has become increasingly important to monitor public attitudes toward AI. Better understanding trends in public opinion is essential in informing decisions pertaining to AI’s development, regulation, and use.

Download the 386-page Stanford report

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