Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Index - Top 10 Takeaways for Industry Decision Makers
The rapid rate of AI development and diffusion is gauged in the 2023 AI Index compiled at Stanford University by an interdisciplinary group of experts from across academia and industry. It tracks, collates, distills and visualizes data relating to AI, enabling decision-makers to take meaningful action to advance AI responsibly and ethically with humans in mind.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved into an era of deployment, with new large-scale AI models released every month throughout 2022 and the beginning of 2023. 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.
A few of the top 10 takeaways include...
- Industry races ahead of academia.
- Performance saturation on traditional benchmarks.
- AI is both helping and harming the environment.
- The world’s best new scientist... AI?
- The demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector.
Large language models keep scaling in size and expense. GPT-2, released in 2019 and considered the first large language model, had 1.5 billion parameters and cost an estimated $50,000 to train. Just three years later, PaLM launched with 540 billion parameters and cost an estimated $8 million. Large language and multimodal models are becoming larger and pricier.
Although 2022 was the first year in a decade where private AI investment decreased, AI is still a topic of great
interest to policymakers, industry leaders, researchers, and the public. Policymakers are talking about AI more
than ever before. Industry leaders that have integrated AI into their businesses are seeing tangible cost and
revenue benefits. The number of AI publications and collaborations continues to increase. And the public is
forming sharper opinions about AI and which elements they like or dislike.
AI will continue to improve and, as such, become a greater part of all our lives. Given the increased presence of this technology and its potential for massive disruption, we should all begin thinking more critically about how exactly we want AI to be developed and deployed. We should also ask questions about who is deploying it—as our analysis shows, AI is increasingly defined by the actions of a small set of private sector actors, rather than a broader range of societal actors. This year’s AI Index paints a picture of where we are so far with AI, in order to highlight what might await us in the future.
This year saw an increase in U.S. job postings seeking AI skills across all sectors, and the number of AI job postings overall were notably higher in 2022 over the prior year. The information sector dominated. California posted the most AI-related jobs by far (142,154), followed by Texas (66,624) and New York (43,899).
Source: Stanford University/IEEE