A new report, ‘The AI Index 2018 Annual Report’, has shown that there were three emerging centres for artificial intelligence (AI) in the world. The focal points are China and the US, but also Europe, said the report.
Prepared by the AI Index Steering Committee, a human-centered AI initiative by the Stanford University, whose mission “is to ground the conversation about AI in data”, the AI Index is an effort to track, collate, distill, and visualise data relating to artificial intelligence. The report claims to be a comprehensive resource of data and analysis for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public “to develop intuitions about the complex field of AI.” The experts who prepared this report include members of Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the nonprofit OpenAI, and the Partnership on AI industry consortium, among others. This is the second annual AI Index.
Here are some key takeaways:
For long, China has been touted as the AI rival to the US. But as the data in this report shows, Europe is also a huge hub of AI activity. Growth in published papers in China has been driven in part by government-affiliated authors, whose work saw a 400 percent increase in 2017. Corporate AI papers saw a 73 percent increase. Conversely, the USsaw its biggest increase in published AI papers from corporate tech giants like Google, Nvidia, and Microsoft. As the AI Index 2018 states, Europe leads the world in total number of research papers produced, followed closely by China.
The US, on the other hand, continues to lead in AI-related patents, and AI startup funding, which was up 4.5 times, compared to 2 times for other sectors receiving venture capital investment.
Another key finding was that over half of the partnership on AI members were nonprofits like the ACLU and the United Nations Development Programme.
Here are some charts:
