AI has played a role in overcoming COVID especially in drug discovery and other related areas in fighting the pandemic. AI investment in drug design and drug discovery has increased significantly The percentage of graduates undertaking a PhD in AI has increased There is a big uptake in generative AI in the ability to compose text, audio, and images to a sufficiently high standard that humans have a hard time telling the difference between synthetic and non-synthetic outputs for some constrained applications of the technology. AI has a diversity challenge China overtakes the US in AI journal citations After surpassing the US in the total number of journal publications several years ago, China now also leads in journal citations; however, the US has consistently (and significantly) more AI conference papers (which are also more heavily cited) than China over the last decade. Surveillance technologies are fast, cheap, and increasingly ubiquitous The technologies necessary for large-scale surveillance are rapidly maturing, with techniques for image classification, face recognition, video analysis, and voice identification all seeing significant progress in 2020. AI ethics lacks benchmarks and consensus Though a number of groups are producing a range of qualitative or normative outputs in the AI ethics domain, the field generally lacks benchmarks that can be used to measure or assess the relationship between broader societal discussions about technology development and the development of the technology itself.

Among foreign graduates, 81.8% stayed in the United States and 8.6% have taken jobs outside the United States.

That's a higher percentage growth than 2018 to 2019 when the volume of publications increased by 19.6 percent. China continues to be a growing force in AI R&D, overtaking the US for overall journal citations in artificial intelligence research last year. The country already publishes more AI papers than any other country, but the United States still has more cited papers at AI conferences -- one indicator of the novelty and significance of the underlying research. These figures come from the fourth annual AI Index, a collection of statistics, benchmarks, and milestones meant to gauge global progress in artificial intelligence. The report is collated with the help of Stanford University, and you can read all 222 pages here.