Chart of the day: Declining AI training costs

It's always good to have concrete examples of technological progress, especially since macroeconomic stats aren't great at capturing the phenomenon. Enter: The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. It recently released its 2022 AI Index Report, which surveys the current landscape of AI research and industrialization. Among the stats tracked in this data-driven report is the cost to train AI systems like ImageNet, an application for identifying and categorizing visual objects. The report finds that training an image-classification system cost only $4.60 in 2021, compared to over $1,000 for a similar system in 2017: "In four short years, image classification training costs have decreased by a factor of 223."