To help you stay well prepared for 2021, we have summarized the latest trends across different research areas, including natural language processing, conversational AI, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. We also suggest key research papers in different areas that we think are representative of the latest advances. Subscribe to our AI Research mailing list at the bottom of this article to be alerted when we release new research articles. In 2020, NLP research advances were still dominated by large pre-trained language models, particularly transformers.This year we're likely to see some more interesting research ideas on improving the transformer architecture and the efficiency of its training. At the same time, we can be sure that top tech companies will continue to exploit the model's size as the main factor for improving the performance of language models, with GPT-4 or something similar likely to be introduced in 2021.