Introduction

The fifth edition of the annual AI Index Report is an initiative by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) that tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence. The report helps decision-makers to take meaningful action to advance AI responsibly and ethically. In this edition, the report highlights that as AI is getting widely deployed in the economy, the ethical issues associated with it is getting overblown.

The report comprises of five sections: research and development, technical performance, technical AI ethics, economy & education and AI policy & governance. The report also clearly pinpoints the major findings under each section. Under research and development, a notable observation is the fact that despite rising geopolitical tensions, US and China have collaborated extensively to make multiple AI publications. Under technical performance, what stands out is the rising interest in particular computer vision subtasks and the fact that AI has become more affordable and higher performing. The report also observes that there is an increased awareness of AI ethics across the globe so much so that there has been a five-fold increase in related publications.

Another interesting fact bought to forefront is that New Zealand, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden are the countries or regions with the highest growth in AI hiring from 2016 to 2021 and that 1 in every 5 computer science students who graduated with PhD degrees specialized in AI/ML in 2020. Regarding AI policy and governance, it has been observed that state legislators in the US passed 1 out of every 50 proposed bills that contain AI provisions in 2021. This shows the heightened awareness of AI among governments and their willingness to accept AI as an enhancement tool in daily activities for which legislation and regulatory framework are necessary.

Relevance of the Report

The report is often counted as the world’s most credible and authoritative source for data and insights about AI. It is a comprehensive report that evaluates the rate of AI deployment across multiple sectors. For this data from a broad set of academic, private, and non-profit organizations have been collected and analysed. Apart from this, the report also lays considerable emphasis on AI ethics and its associated metrics with an entire chapter devoted towards it.

Key Takeaways

• Increase in private investment in AI. In 2021, total private investment equaled USD 93.5 billion
• Between 2010 and 2021, US and China had the maximum number of cross-country collaborations in AI publications
• Even though language models have been trained to perform better, they are still reflecting biases from training data
• Ethical AI that focuses on fairness and transparency has increased have gained focus which is reflected in the rising number of related publications
• Increase in affordability of AI due to lower cost of training data
• Increased global awareness regarding AI has resulted in resulted in passage of AI laws and bills in various countries. The US, UK and Spain passed the highest number of AI-related bills in 2021
• Increased affordability and accessibility of robotics research has resulted in decline in price of robotic arms