The 2023 Artificial Intelligence (AI) report was released by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). The report examines AI’s influence and advancement. It delves deeper into matters pertaining to AI like economics, ethics, research, the policy as well as public opinion.
The 2023 report was compiled by researchers from Stanford University as well as AI companies including Google, Anthropic, and Hugging Face. All the compilers say that the world of AI is entering a new stage of development.
The main findings of the report show how AI study is increasing with subject matters including pattern recognition, machine learning, and computer vision. This year’s report shows that the number of AI publications has doubled since 2010. The report points out that of 32 important machine learning models that the industry produced, just 3 were made by academics. It refers to the massive resources that are required for training these bulky models.
The report sheds light on how state-of-the-art systems are now the domain of massive technological companies. Experts believe that these firms will have a say on how to balance risk and opportunity in this fast-moving field.
It is worth noting that AI has revolutionized many sectors, including education transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing. In the education sector, AI can be exploited to personalize learning and offer individualized valuable feedback to modern learners. In the transportation sector, AI is now used to develop self-driving cars and enhance traffic flow. In the healthcare sector, physicians use AI to examine medical images, detect diseases, and predict patient outcomes. In the manufacturing sectors, industrialists employ AI to optimize production processes and boost supply chain management.
Despite this, the development of AI is raising concerns about ethics and societies, such as matters pertaining to privacy, biases, and job displacement by robots in various fields. Governments, non-governmental organizations, decision-makers, society, and researchers need to ponder on these matters and exert effort to guarantee that the development and use of AI in various sectors be responsible and ethical with humans in mind.
The report has reported striking findings about the fleeting spread of technology in this era.
The report coincided with the signing of almost 1800 dignitaries inking an open letter that seek a half-year halt on the advancement of systems that are more powerful than GPT-4. The dignitaries technologists and researchers like include Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and scientist Gary Marcus.
“We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the letter said.
Below are some key points from this year’s Stanford University’s 386-page AI Report:
Drastic improvements
The report indicated that AI models are swifter than they were in 2021 and this is attributed to the technical achievement benchmarks across language or text image and video assessments. It pointed out that AI produced state-of-the-art findings but on an annual basis enhancement on many yardsticks showed a marginal boost, highlighting the announcement of wide-ranging yardsticks such as Big-bench and HELM.
AI boosts scientific development
The report emphasizes that AI models are playing a great role in speeding up scientific evolution. Last year, most of these models were used to aid hydrogen fusion, produce new antibodies, and enhance the proficiency of matrix manipulation.
Companies resort to AI
Many companies that are implementing AI around the world have doubled since 2017. The report showed that companies that have decided to integrate AI in their operations stated lower costs and higher revenue in their dealings. It said: “Organisations that have adopted AI report realizing meaningful cost decreases and revenue increases.”
Misuse of AI on the rise
As firms exert efforts to advance novel AI technologies, countless misuse of these technologies has been cited. The report has pointed out to the growing number of AI-powered security breaches. Generally, the number of AI incidents has increased 26 times since 2012. The incidents have been attributed to the full exploitation of AI technologies and their potential misuse. The report also said that the enhanced
Rise in AI jobs demand
The Stanford University report says that there has been significant growth in the demand for AI-related professional skills in various American industrial sectors. The number of AI-related jobs has risen from 1.7% in 2021 to 1.9% in 2022. It showed that employers in America are increasingly seeking to hire talents with AI-related skills. Individuals holding AI PhDs are opting for private sector jobs (65%) compared to academia (28%) or government (1%).
Governments focus mainly on AI
The report has also mentioned that governments globally are shifting focus on AI. It examined the legislative records of 127 states worldwide and discovered that 37 bills consisting of AI became law last year versus only one in 2016. According to the report, the US Administration raised its AI-related contract spending by 2.5x since 2017. US Courts also recorded a rise in AI-related legal cases.
Chinese Feel More Positive with AI Products, Americans Not Much
Chinese citizens (78%) have stated that AI-related products and services have more benefits. They were followed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (76%) and India (71%). The percentage of Americans who said that AI-related products and services have more benefits was only 35%.
Regarding, Saudi Arabia, AI has become a fundamental topic. The new Neom city is expected to integrate Artificial Intelligence. It is worth noting that the Kingdom granted citizenship in 2017 to the first robot named Sophia.
The Kingdom is striving to be a leading player in the AI sector. It organized a global summit in 2000 bringing together decision-makers, experts, and specialists from Saudi’s private and public sectors in addition to technology companies, investors, and businessmen around the world.
Between October 21-22, the Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit entitled “AI for the Good of Humanity”, was held in the Saudi capital Riyadh under the patronage of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It was organized by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA). The summit was held virtually as part of the precautionary measures announced by the Saudi government during the pandemic.
The Kingdom’s National Strategy for Data and Artificial Intelligence is focused on six dimensions: Ambitions, Skills, Policy and Regulations, Research, Investment, and Ecosystem.
Reduction of Private Investment in AI
Globally, private investment in AI has decreased by 26.7% from 2021-2022, and AI funding for startups has also slowed down. Over the last decade, AI investment has recorded a significant increase. The report shows that, compared to 2013, the amount of private investment in AI was 18 times greater in 2022. There was also a decrease in the number of companies with new AI adoption initiatives. The report says that between 2017 and 2022, the proportion of companies adopting AI doubled, but there has been a recent decrease of about 50-60%.
AI –More Harm Than Good to the Environment
Several researches have suggested that AI systems can cause 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. However, new reinforcement learning models such as BCOOLER point out that AI systems can be used to conserve energy.
Models are Getting Smarter, Bigger, and Faster
The report shows that AI models are getting smarter, bigger, and faster. Currently, AI models are getting a million times more data in training than ten years ago. The report points out that until 2014, most significant machine knowledge models were released by academia. However, now they seem to have been overtaken by the industry. Last year, 32 significant industries-produced machine learning models contrasted with the mere three produced by academia. The huge gap between the industry and academia is attributed to the large amounts of data, computational prowess, and money required to build AI systems, something which industries are well-endowed with compared to nonprofit organizations and academia.
In a nutshell
Apart from the above-mentioned points, this year’s report by Stanford University also contains many other insights touching on foundation models, such as their geopolitics and training costs, the environmental impact of AI systems, K-12 AI education, public opinion trends in AI, and many more.
