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.

The French government is successfully using AI to discover taxable swimming pools. IT firm Capgemini worked with Google to create the AI which analyses aerial photos taken by France's National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information, identifies pools, and then cross-references them with national tax and property registries. So far, the project has spotted 20,356 undeclared swimming pools. The government has used the data to collect almost €10 million in additional taxes. Despite the project's success, it's only been used for nine out of France's 96 metro areas.

Earlier this month, Brookings Metro published a data-driven snapshot of the growth and geography of the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) economy in the United States. Employing seven basic measures of AI research and commercial activity, the report benchmarked U.S. metropolitan areas on the basis of their core AI assets and capabilities as they stand now. Here, we look at the report's most important takeaways through five charts. The AI industry is growing rapidly, with AI-related projects accounting for a substantially larger share of federal research and development expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. Similarly, newly founded firms that provide AI solutions of all tech startups expanded to more than 5%, from less than 1% a decade ago.

Fueled with a $36 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership has launched an initiative called AnalytiXIN to promote innovations in data science throughout Indiana. Build connections between Indiana's manufacturing and life sciences companies and the university researchers who can help them use artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics to tackle big challenges like reducing a factory's carbon footprint or improving worker health. "This is one way to ensure early that these kinds of critical collaborations are happening," said David Johnson, president and CEO of the Indianapolis-based Central Indiana Corporate Partnership. About half of the $36 million will be used to hire university-level data-science researchers, some of whom will be based at 16 Tech in Indianapolis. The other half will go toward the creation of "data lakes," or large data sets built from information from multiple contributors.

Last week, the Brookings Institution published an examination of the "extent, location, and concentration" of AI activity in 400 US metro areas, hailing it as the "next great'general purpose technology,'" with the power to spur economic growth. Key takeaways: Although it already feels like AI is everywhere, the tech is still in its early days--and in the US, AI development and commercialization is mega-concentrated in a handful of mostly coastal locales. But, but, but: Brookings also identified 13 other metro areas with "above-average involvement" in AI, including hubs you may have seen coming--New York, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Austin, Texas, and Raleigh, North Carolina--as well as smaller metro areas like Boulder, Colorado, Lincoln, Nebraska, Santa Cruz, California, Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Zoom out: The above 15 metro areas account for two-thirds of AI activity nationwide--and for that matter, more than 50% of the areas Brookings looked at make up just 5% of AI activity, Wired reported.

Much of the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) discussion revolves around futuristic dreams of both utopia and dystopia. However, it bears remembering that AI is also becoming a real-world economic fact with major implications for national and regional economic development as the U.S. crawls out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on advanced uses of statistics, algorithms, and fast computer processing, AI has become a focal point of U.S. innovation debates. Even more, AI is increasingly viewed as the next great "general purpose technology"--one that has the power to boost the productivity of sector after sector of the economy. All of which is why state and city leaders are increasingly assessing AI for its potential to spur economic growth.

A handful of superstar U.S. metro areas are leading the way in AI, while much of the rest of the country is at risk of being left behind. Why it matters: AI can enhance productivity and growth in multiple sectors, but as a technology that tends to centralize around a handful of talent hubs, it could also increase regional economic disparity across the country. What's happening: In a new report released today, researchers at the Brookings Institution assessed the geographic distribution of AI talent, investment and research around the U.S. The other side: More than half of the 261 U.S. metro areas surveyed by Brookings exhibit no significant AI activities at all. What they're saying: "AI is at the stage where it is highly dependent on a super-specific talent base, and there's also a heavy need for massive computing power," says Mark Muro, policy director at Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program and a co-author of the report. What to watch: Muro notes that many of the AI early adopters benefited from federal investments in R&D that could potentially be spread more evenly around the country.

A new study warns that the American AI industry is highly concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area and that this could prove to be a weakness in the long run. The Bay leads all other regions of the country in AI research and investment activity, accounting for about one-quarter of AI conference papers, patents, and companies in the US. Bay Area metro areas see levels of AI activity four times higher than other top cities for AI development. "When you have a high percentage of all AI activity in Bay Area metros, you may be overconcentrating, losing diversity, and getting groupthink in the algorithmic economy. It locks in a winner-take-most dimension to this sector, and that's where we hope that federal policy will begin to invest in new and different AI clusters in new and different places to provide a balance or counter," Mark Muro, policy director at the Brookings Institution and the study's coauthor, told WIRED.

The self-driving technology industry is in a strange state right now. A number of companies have been pouring millions of dollars into self-driving technology for years, and many of them have prototype self-driving vehicles that seem to work. Yet I know of only one company--Waymo--that has launched a fully driverless commercial taxi service. And I only know of one company--Nuro--that's running a driverless commercial delivery service on public roads. You'd expect these companies to be capitalizing on their early leads by expanding rapidly, but neither seems to be doing that.

Last November, Brookings published a report on artificial intelligence's impact on the workplace that immediately raised eyebrows. Many readers, journalists, and even experts were perplexed by the report's primary finding: that, for the most part, it is better-paid, better-educated white-collar workers who are most exposed to AI's potential economic disruption. This conclusion--by authors Mark Muro, Robert Maxim, and Jacob Whiton--seemed to fly in the face of the popular understanding of technology's future effects on workers. For years, we've been hearing about how these advancements will force mainly blue-collar, lower-income workers out of jobs, as robotics and technology slowly consume those industries. In an article about the November report, The Mercury News outlined this discrepancy: "The study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution seems to contradict findings from previous studies--including Brookings' own--that showed lower-skilled workers will be most affected by robots and automation, which can involve AI."