State of AI in 2020

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently one of the hottest topics. These are exciting times for scientists and investors. Here is an overview of artificial intelligence topics in 2020.

Adoption and impact AI

While recent findings do not indicate an increase in the use of artificial intelligence, some companies benefit from artificial intelligence at the enterprise level, and many of them generate revenue and cost reductions at least at the function level.

The results of this year’s artificial intelligence research suggest that organizations use AI as a tool to generate value. Increasingly, this value comes in the form of revenues. Companies are planning to invest even more in artificial intelligence in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and accelerate all digital assets. This could lead to a greater gap between AI leaders and most companies that still have difficulty using this technology, but these leaders engage in a number of practices that can help achieve success. And while companies in general are making some progress in reducing the risks of artificial intelligence, most of them have a long way to go.

According to the industry, respondents in the high-tech and telecommunications sectors are again the most frequently reported AI adoption and the automotive and assembly sector is just behind them.

Research

We start from the technical side: only 15% of AI articles have an open code, PyTorch has the majority of “research market share” and several university groups have reached the level of one billion parameters. It also highlights the economic and environmental costs of mass models. Although hardware improves, the cost of deep learning is growing exponentially. For applications this year, natural language processing (NLP) was the most important. Of course, COVID-19 has also made a mark on the AI community, thanks to efforts devoted to almost all aspects of the disease.

Talent

The number of researchers leaving academic world for large technology companies is growing all the time. To prevent this, universities focus on specialized AI institutes and funding initiatives.

The international brain drain is even bigger. Despite COVID, the demand for artificial intelligence talent is still high and the number of AI entries is growing.

Industry

Pharmaceutical products based on artificial intelligence are the main attraction. We are approaching the point where the medicines found by AI will enter the market. This goes hand-in-hand with a medical boom. Current validation methods are not designed for products found by artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence or continuous workflow improvements.

The autonomous vehicle industry is facing similar problems. Car legislation without a driver stays behind than AV alone – even though billions are coming. Work on improved infrastructure and ML operations also goes up.

Politics

This year, ethical issues related to the mainstreaming of SI have appeared, including inter alia gender and race prejudices, police and military use, face recognition, surveillance and deep fake. In particular, the interest of the army in AI is alarming, but far from unexpected.

New ethical codes have been adopted and some companies are moving toward the ideals of justice and privacy. However, there is still a long way to go before a real change. Chip manufacturing and intellectual property seem to be a much bigger problem for governments.

Risk Management AI

Although many companies still do not realize the majority of the risks associated with artificial intelligence, they have reduced some of the risks.

A minority of companies see many risks associated with the using of artificial intelligence and work less to reduce them – as was the case in 2019. Cybersecurity remains the only risk that most respondents consider as important. Overall, industry people indicate that every risk remains as significant as it is.

However, some of the less commonly considered risks are those for which we are seeing greater mitigation. National security and physical security are now more taken into account than in 2019.

Coronavirus effect

Companies which see the value of artificial intelligence continue to invest in it during a pandemic. The majority of high-performing respondents say that their organizations have increased their investments in artificial intelligence in each of the main business functions in response to a pandemic. By industry, automotive and assembly respondents, healthcare services, pharmaceuticals and medical products tend to say that their companies have increased their investment.