The Mad Rush to publish AI Research

By 2017, it became clear that big tech companies were deeply interested in AI. In the same year, Pitchbook reported that companies around the world had spent USD 21.3 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions, an amount believed to be 26 times more than its value in 2015. Jeff Wilke, former chief executive of Amazon worldwide consumer and close ally to company CEO Jeff Bezos then stated, "If you're a tech company and you're not building AI as a core competence, then you're setting yourself up for an invention from the outside." Between 2000 and 2016, companies like IBM and Microsoft were already investing heavily in AI research. Google and Facebook were only moderately involved in AI research and hiring researchers depending on how profitable the project they were working on was.