The Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI) at Stanford University has released the seventh annual edition of its comprehensive AI Index report, written by an interdisciplinary team of academic and industry experts.
This edition has more content than previous ones, reflecting the rapid evolution of AI and its growing importance in our daily lives.
This report examines which sectors use AI the most to which country is most nervous about job loss due to AI. But one of the most highlighted aspects of the report is the performance of AI compared to humans.
AI is already better than us in many fields
For those who haven’t been paying attention, AI has already surpassed us in a frankly scandalous number of significant benchmarks. In 2015, it surpassed us in image classification, then in basic reading comprehension (2017), visual reasoning (2020), and natural language inference (2021).
AI is becoming so intelligent and so fast that many of the benchmarks used so far have become obsolete. In fact, researchers in this field are working hard to develop new, more demanding parameters.
In short, AI is so good at passing tests that we now need new tests, not to measure competence, but to highlight the areas where humans and AI are still different, and discover where we still have an advantage.
If you pay attention, you will see that this Report on the Artificial Intelligence Index ends in late 2023, a very tumultuous year of artificial intelligence acceleration. In fact, the only year crazier than 2023 has been 2024, in which we have seen, among other things, the launch of cataclysmic developments such as Suno, Sora, Google Genie, Claude 3, Channel 1, and Devin.
Each of these products, and many others, have the potential to revolutionize entire sectors. And above all of them looms the mysterious specter of GPT-5, which threatens to be such a broad and comprehensive model that it could well consume all the others.
AI is here to stay, that’s for sure. The fast pace of technical development observed throughout 2023, evident in this report, demonstrates that AI will only continue to evolve and bridge the gap between humans and technology.
The report also analyzes the negative aspects of the evolution of AI and how it is affecting the global public perception of its security, reliability, and ethics. And that’s where things don’t look so impressive.
