Blog

Stanford AI Report Takeaways 2023

May 8, 2023 By Jay Borthen

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a buzzword in government circles for years, and the technology is advancing at an unprecedented pace. With AI becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives, it’s more important than ever to stay up-to-date on the latest developments and challenges facing this field. That’s why we’re excited to share with you the key takeaways from the latest Stanford AI Report. Released just this year, this report outlines the trends, opportunities, and challenges that will shape the future of AI in the next few years.

  • Industry, not academia, has started producing the most significant Machine Learning models.
  • Many AI benchmarks are seeing only marginal year-over-year improvements.
  • AI systems are becoming more flexible and are increasingly capable of navigating multiple tasks such as vision and language.
  • Language models are still struggling with reasoning.
  • AI systems can have serious environmental impacts – causing the emission of significant levels of carbon with the amount of energy required to train and operationalize the AI models.
  • AI models are beginning to rapidly accelerate scientific progress (e.g. aided hydrogen fusion, improved efficiency of matrix manipulation, and generated new antibodies)
  • Self-improving AI is accelerating AI progress.
  • The number of incidents concerning the misuse of AI is rapidly rising.
  • Generative models are routinely creating ethical problems.
  • Interest in K–12 AI and computer science education grows in both the United States and the rest of the world.
  • The demand for AI-related professional skills is increasing across virtually every American industrial sector.
  • For the first time in the last decade, year-over-year private investment in AI decreased.
  • While the proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, the companies that have adopted AI continue to pull ahead.
  • The United States leads in investment in AI.
  • The U.S. government continues to increase spending on AI.
  • Currently, the AI focus area with the most investment is medical and healthcare;  followed by data management, processing, and cloud; and then Fintech.
  • Policymaker interest in AI is on the rise.
  • Chinese citizens are among those who feel the most positively about AI products and services.
  • China dominates industrial robot installations.
  • North American bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD-level computer science students are becoming more ethnically diverse.
  • Women make up an increasingly greater share of CS, CE, and information faculty hires.
  • Men tend to feel more positively about AI products and services than women.
  • People across the world and especially America remain unconvinced by self-driving cars.

If your organization is interested in learning more about how your organization can benefit from AI and Machine Learning or Swish, please feel free to reach out at COETeam@swishdata.com.

Nestor Maslej, Loredana Fattorini, Erik Brynjolfsson, John Etchemendy, Katrina Ligett, Terah Lyons, James Manyika, Helen Ngo, Juan Carlos Niebles, Vanessa Parli, Yoav Shoham, Russell Wald, Jack Clark, and Raymond Perrault, “The AI Index 2023 Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, April 2023. https://aiindex.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/HAI_AI-Index-Report_2023.pdf