2020 State of AI report

Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth’s 2020 State of AI report came out. It covers research, talent, industry, and politics, and is once again full of great in-depth data and analysis. It touches on many of the trends I’ve covered in DT this year, including gargantuan (Transformer) language models, productized NLP, reproducibility, accelerator chips, and self-driving progress. A few topics that are a bit outside DT’s scope but that are very interesting nonetheless include their assertion that biology is experiencing its “AI moment”, their analysis of talent education and flow, and their summary of geopolitical trends surrounding AI hardware and software companies. (Google Slides link; an executive summary is on slide 7.)