10 Charts That Will Change Your Perspective On Artificial Intelligence's Growth

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These and many other fascinating insights are from Stanford University’s inaugural AI Index (PDF, no opt-in, 101 pp.). Stanford has undertaken a One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) looking at the effects of AI on people’s lives, basing the inaugural report and index on the initial findings. The study finds “that we’re essentially “flying blind” in our conversations and decision-making related to Artificial Intelligence.” The AI Index is focused on tracking activity and progress on AI initiatives, and to facilitate informed conversations grounded with reliable, verifiable data. All data used to produce the AI Index and report is available at aiindex.org. Please see the AI Index for additional details regarding the methodology used to create each of the following graphs.

The following ten charts from the AI Index report provides insights into AI’s rapid growth:

  • The number of Computer Science academic papers and studies has soared by more than 9X since 1996. Academic studies and research are often the precursors to new intellectual property and patents. The entire Scopus database contains over 200,000 (200,237) papers in the field of Computer Science that have been indexed with the key term “Artificial Intelligence.” The Scopus database contains almost 5 million (4,868,421) papers in the subject area “Computer Science.”
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/

  • There have been a 6X increase in the annual investment levels by venture capital (VC) investors into U.S.-based Ai startups since 2000. Crunchbase, VentureSource, and Sand Hill Econometrics were used to determine the amount of funding invested each year by venture capitalists into startups where AI plays an important role in some key function of the business. The following graphic illustrates the amount of annual funding by VC’s into US AI startups across all funding stages.
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
  • There has been a 14X increase in the number of active AI startups since 2000. Crunchbase, VentureSource, and Sand Hill Econometrics were also used for completing this analysis with AI startups in Crunchbase cross-referenced to venture-backed companies in the VentureSource database. Any venture-backed companies from the Crunchbase list that were identified in the VentureSource database were included.
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
  • The share of jobs requiring AI skills has grown 4.5X since 2013., The growth of the share of US jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform was calculated by first identifying AI-related jobs using titles and keywords in descriptions. Job growth is a calculated as a multiple of the share of jobs on the Indeed platform that required AI skills in the U.S. starting in January 2013. The study also calculated the growth of the share of jobs requiring AI skills on the Indeed.com platform, by country. Despite the rapid growth of the Canada and UK. AI job markets, Indeed.com reports they are respectively still 5% and 27% of the absolute size of the US AI job market.
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
  • Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are the three most in-demand skills on Monster.com. Just two years ago NLP had been predicted to be the most in-demand skill for application developers creating new AI apps. In addition to skills creating AI apps, machine learning techniques, Python, Java, C++, experience with open source development environments, Spark, MATLAB, and Hadoop are the most in-demand skills. Based on an analysis of Monster.com entries as of today, the median salary is $127,000 in the U.S. for Data Scientists, Senior Data Scientists, Artificial Intelligence Consultants and Machine Learning Managers.
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
  • Error rates for image labeling have fallen from 28.5% to below 2.5% since 2010. AI’s inflection point for Object Detection task of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (LSVRC) Competition occurred in 2014. On this specific test, AI is now more accurate than human These findings are from the competition data from the leaderboards for each LSVRC competition hosted on the ImageNet website.
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
2017 AI Index Report, http://aiindex.org/
  • 87% of current AI adopters said they were using or considering using AI for sales forecasting and for improving e-mail marketing. 61% of all respondents said that they currently used or were planning to use AI for sales forecasting. The following graphic compares adoption rates of current AI adopters versus all respondents. Source: Statista.  


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