AI's Global Race: Innovations, Investments, and Public Concerns United States is leading the global leadership in AI with 61 notable AI models, followed by the EU with 21 notable models, and then China with 15 notable models. Also, in 2023, a huge investment was made in generative Al—USD 25.2 billion, an eightfold increase from 2022

Industries around the world are rushing towards technological advancements for several reasons. Today, around the world, be it developed nations or developing nations; all are trying their luck in Artificial Intelligence, Generative Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and neurochips among other fields to support societal challenges. A recent AI index released by Stanford shed light on several developments and challenges in Artificial Intelligence.

As per the data, the United States is leading the global leadership in AI with 61 notable AI models, followed by the EU with 21 notable models, and then China with 15 notable models. Also, in 2023, a huge investment was made in generative Al—USD 25.2 billion, an eightfold increase from 2022 despite a significant decrease in overall Al private investment. Currently, players in the generative Al who reported substantial fundraising rounds are OpenAl, Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Inflection.

Nevertheless, the same companies are significantly lacking in maintaining a standard benchmark toward responsible AI. These companies tested their models against different benchmarks leading to risks and challenges that could arise from this practice. Also, these notable companies are becoming more expensive in their Al model training. For example, OpenAl's GPT-4 used an estimated USD 78 million worth of computing for training its model, while Google's Gemini Ultra cost USD 191 million for computing.

In addition to this, industries continue to dominate Al research frontiers. Industries produced 51 machine-learning models in 2023. While academia contributed 15 models and industry-academia collaborations resulted in 21 models. AI technology also hugely contributed to scientific progress even further. In the year of 2022, industries started developing advanced scientific discoveries. However, in 2023, we saw the launch of even more significant scientific Al applications from companies such as AlphaDev, and GNOME.

Interestingly, AI performance surpassed humans in various creative fields including image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding however, it is still navigating itself in complex tasks where humans do far better such as competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning, and, planning. Still today after so much has been done in AI technology it is not able to match the human natural abilities. The data highlights that industries need to go further to match human natural abilities.

However, AI is pretty good at handling mundane tasks that lead to employees' productivity and higher quality of work. Several studies were conducted on Al's impact on labor in 2023, suggesting the same. Also, studies demonstrated Al's potential to bridge the skill gap between low and high-skilled workers. Still, industries need to be cautious or it could lead to diminished performance.

The rapid development in high-performance technologies is also concerning for governments with the American government launching AI-related regulations significantly from one in 2016 to 25 in 2023. A 56 per cent increase in regulations has been seen in 2023 alone. Yet, 66 per cent of Americans believe AI will significantly impact their lives in the next three-five years. While 52 per cent express nervousness towards AI products, up by 13 percentage points from 2022 and 52 per cent feel more concerned than excited about AI up from 37 per cent in 2022.

"AI faces two interrelated futures. First, technology continues to improve and is increasingly used, having major consequences for productivity and employment. It can be put to both good and bad uses. In the second future, the adoption of AI is constrained by the limitations of the technology. Regardless of which future unfolds, governments are increasingly concerned. They are stepping in to encourage the upside, such as funding university R&D and incentivizing private investment. Governments are also aiming to manage the potential downsides, such as impacts on employment, privacy concerns, misinformation, and intellectual property rights", said Ray Perrault and Jack Clark, Co-directors, AI Index.