Despite suggestions it has been losing its edge, California is way ahead of others when it comes to the hottest technology right now: artificial intelligence. The regions around San Francisco, San José and Los Angeles are among the best prepped for AI in the country, according to a report released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution. The Washington think tank dubbed the San Francisco and San José metropolitan areas "superstars" when it comes to AI readiness. Three out of the top 10 city regions most ready for AI are in California, according to the report. No other state has more than one region in the top 10.

Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are spending billions of dollars for top talent to make up ground in the generative artificial intelligence race, sparking doubt about the wisdom of the spree. OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently lamented that Meta has offered 100 million bonuses to engineers who jump to Zuckerberg's ship, where hefty salaries await. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan.

Some European tech workers who might once have headed to the United States are looking at defense startups closer to home. Others are rushing back to Europe from jobs abroad. A sense of patriotism stirred by the war in Ukraine and U.S. President Donald Trump's upending of security alliances is a motivation for many, as well as the opportunity to make money as European governments boost military spending.

Plug-in hybrids are supposed to be the best of both worlds--the convenience of a gas-powered car with the climate benefits of a battery electric vehicle. But new data suggests that some official figures severely underestimate the emissions they produce. According to new real-world driving data from Europe, plug-in hybrids produce roughly 3.5 times the emissions official estimates suggest. The difference is largely linked to driver habits: people tend to charge plug-in hybrids and drive them in electric mode less than expected. It's important to close the gap between expectations and reality not only for individuals' sake, but also to ensure that policies aimed at cutting emissions have the intended effects.

ChatGPT promises to democratize artificial intelligence, and is already making it relatively easy for non-data-scientist types to partake in the wonders of machine-generated wisdom. Google and Microsoft are following suit and souping up their search engines. Does this portend reduced demand for AI talent? Relief from AI talent shortages isn't likely anytime soon, but democratized AI may expand the meaning of business intelligence. "We are trying to teach business users to speak AI instead of teaching AI to speak business," says Arijit Sengupta, CEO and Founder of Aible.

During a trip home to Johannesburg, South Africa, while completing an engineering master's program in Japan, Pelonomi Moiloa attended the largest machine learning community gathering she'd ever seen in Africa, just a few miles from where she grew up. In all, 600 people from 22 nations attended 2017's Deep Learning Indaba, held at the University of Witwatersrand, discussing topics like health care and agriculture solutions custom-made to meet the needs of African people. That week-long gathering made Moiloa feel she could have an impact on the lives of Africans, and it helped convince her to move back to South Africa and look for a way to put her engineering skills to work on her home continent. "The conversations were around making a genuine impact and positive change in African lives on a mass scale, and that was something I really wanted to be a part of," she says. This month, Moiloa will join some organizers of Deep Learning Indaba to launch Lelapa, a commercial and industrial AI research company focused on serving the needs of the 1 billion people in Africa.

January 20, 2023After five years of steady, sometimes heady, growth, AI adoption has plateaued, according to The state of AI in 2022, our annual survey of 1,500 companies. Use cases are stable, and the market for tech talent is tight, with new "hot jobs" surfacing every year. But much remains to be done about managing risk and building inclusive teams. "After a period of initial exuberance, we have reached a plateau, a course we've observed with other technologies in their early years of adoption," says partner Michael Chui. He authored the research with senior partners and QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey leaders Alex Singla and Alex Sukharevsky; partner Helen Mayhew; and associate partner Bryce Hall.

December 1, 2022McKinsey has been named a Leader, the highest designation, in The Forrester Wave: AI Service Providers, Q4 2022 report. Forrester evaluated 12 firms, assessing them on 29 criteria grouped into the categories of current offering, strategy, and market presence. We received the highest possible rating in criteria including AI talent, vision, and market approach. "McKinsey & Company leads enterprises with end-to-end AI transformation," the Forrester report notes, also recognizing that "McKinsey addresses AI holistically: as a technology, an operational model, and a strategic asset." The report also notes that McKinsey "[places] a heavy emphasis on ROI." McKinsey acquired the AI arm of our firm, QuantumBlack, in 2015, and the Forrester report points out that this move "continues to deliver top-notch data science talent."

Adoption has more than doubled since 2017, though the proportion of organizations using AI 1 1. In the survey, we defined AI as the ability of a machine to perform cognitive functions that we associate with human minds (for example, natural-language understanding and generation) and to perform physical tasks using cognitive functions (for example, physical robotics, autonomous driving, and manufacturing work). A set of companies seeing the highest financial returns from AI continue to pull ahead of competitors. The results show these leaders making larger investments in AI, engaging in increasingly advanced practices known to enable scale and faster AI development, and showing signs of faring better in the tight market for AI talent. On talent, for the first time, we looked closely at AI hiring and upskilling.

Chinese employers have recently advertised for nearly a million employees with technical AI skills, according to an analysis from US think tank the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). The think tank sought to better understand China's AI workforce, to better comprehend the industry landscape, and to make sense of what China's needs mean for US demand for AI talent. "The AI workforce is global and in high demand, and a large share of top-tier technical talent in the United States is foreign-born. Given China is a major producer of AI-skilled talent, understanding its AI workforce could provide US policymakers with important insight," states a CSET Issue Brief titled "China's AI Workforce Assessing Demand for AI Talent". The document explains that such assessments are not easy given limited and opaque information streams from sources like Chinese ministries, state-sponsored media and anecdotal reporting.