The Global AI Talent Tracker released by MacroPolo, a think tank of the Paulson Institute in Chicago reveals that 12 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers received their undergraduate education in India. India is second to the US (35 per cent) in this category. However, the report also found out that none of these scientists works here. That said, 11 per cent of AI researchers working for US institutions come from India.

The United States is the leader in the AI research sector. More than 60 per cent of top-tier researchers work for American universities and companies. The report says that US lead is built on attracting international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI researchers working in the United States receiving undergraduate degrees in other countries.

China leads in the source of top-tier researchers. Twenty-nine per cent of AI researchers received undergraduate degrees in China. But the majority of those Chinese researchers go on to study, work and live in the United States, states the report.

More than 70 per cent of the researchers who got an undergraduate degree from India went to the US for their graduation while around 11 per cent went to Europe. Canada and Australia are the other countries where Indian students went for their graduation in AI, finds the report.

The think tank used Neural Information Processing Systems, a.k.a. NeurIPS, an AI conference for deep learning, to collate the data. For NeurIPS’s conference held on last December, 15,920 researchers submit 6,614 papers, with a paper acceptance rate of 21.6 per cent, making it one of the largest, most popular, and most selective AI conferences on record.