The growing importance and relevance of artificial intelligence (AI) to humanity is undisputed. However, AI does not seem to have a universally agreed definition, and different sectors of society use very different vocabulary to describe AI. Using AI to define AI, we were able to detect the relevant body of research, further structure it in sub-fields, and give a comprehensive overview of the research landscape. There are strong regional differences in AI activity:
• China aspires to lead globally in AI and focuses on computer vision. It shows a rapid rise in scholarly output and citation impact. A net brain gain of AI researchers to China also suggests an attractive research environment.
• Europe is the largest producer of AI scholarly output, but appears to be losing academic AI talent. The broad spectrum of AI research in Europe reflects the diversity of European countries, each with their own agenda and specialties. 2
• AI research in the United States is robust, both in terms of scholarly output and talent retention. The US benefits from a strong corporate sector. The corpus shows less diversity in AI research than Europe but more than China. A key area of further development in AI research worldwide is on ethical issues pertaining to AI. While a major topic in daily conversation, there is surprisingly little formal research published on AI ethics to date.
Source: https://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2814/1/s02-2019-dekleijn-en.pdf
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, compute, and money, resources that industry actors inherently possess in greater amounts compared to nonprofits and academia.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://aiindex.stanford.edu/report/#individual-chapters
Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai-in-2022-and-a-half-decade-in-review
Source: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/data-and-analytics/publications/artificial-intelligence-study.html
