Stanford HAI Releases 2024 Artificial Intelligence Index Report

From a Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Post:

A decade ago, the world’s best AI systems were incapable of classifying images at a human level. They could not understand language, struggled with visual reasoning, and flunked the most basic reading comprehension tests. Today, AI systems routinely exceed human performance on standard benchmarks.

This is just one of the new findings of the 2024 AI Index, an annual study of trends in AI from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). The AI Index, led by an independent and interdisciplinary group of AI thought leaders from industry and academia, is one of the most comprehensive annual reports on progress in AI; it tracks trends in research and development, technical performance, responsible AI, economics, policy, public opinion, and more. The report is grounded in quantitative data and designed to put key decision-makers, like policy leaders and business executives, in a position to best understand what is occurring in the world of AI.

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AI Gets More Expensive

Model training costs, as first reported in last year’s AI Index report, also continued climbing. New estimates suggest that certain frontier systems, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, cost $78 million to train. Google Gemini’s price tag came in at $191 million. By comparison, some state-of-the-art models released half a decade or so ago, namely the original transformer model (2017) and RoBERTa Large (2019), respectively cost around $900 and $160,000 to train.

Worldwide, America Dominates

Finally, from a global perspective, the U.S. continued to lead in AI. In 2023, substantially more significant AI models (61) came from U.S.-based institutions, compared with the European Union (21) and China (15). The U.S. also remains the premier location for AI investing. A total of $67.2 billion was privately invested in AI in the U.S. in 2023, nearly nine times more than the amount in China.

The new index shows China is America’s biggest competitor. China leads the world in robotic installations, having installed more robots in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. Likewise, the majority of the world’s AI patents (61 percent) originated from China.

Ultimately, the 2024 AI Index report makes clear that this technology continues to progress rapidly and the world including business leaders, policymakers, and the general public is beginning to react.

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