Visualising AI spending: How does it compare with history's mega projects? World leaders and tech executives are convening in New Delhi for the India-AI Impact Summit 2026, focusing on the role of artificial intelligence in governance, job disruption and global collaboration. However, behind these discussions lies the financial reality. Over the past decade, AI has drawn one of the largest waves of private investment in modern history, totalling trillions of dollars. According to Gartner, a United States-based business and technology insights company, worldwide spending on AI is forecast to total $2.5 trillion in 2026, a 44 percent increase over 2025.

Global private investment and the number of AI startups decreased in 2022, while the industry's adoption of the technology has plateaued compared to previous years, according to new data. This revelation hits at a time when AI hype is at an all-time high. Commercial tools capable of generating images, text, code, video, audio, and even music are rapidly improving and becoming increasingly convincing. Companies across different industries are looking to deploy generative AI features to revamp existing products and services or create new ones. Analysts are predicting the boom will increase global productivity and change the labor force, while experts are debating whether the technology poses an existential threat to humanity.

Adoption of Fourth-Industrial-Revolution (4IR) technologies in sub-Saharan Africa could bring not only substantial economic growth and welfare benefits, but also social and economic disruption, including widening inequality if countervailing policies are not adopted, as discussed in our recent report. With a high share of the labor force working informally--a trend expected to continue for several decades--Africa's education and industrial policies need to strike a balance between encouraging private investment needed to create new formal jobs using advanced technology and ensuring that all new labor force entrants have the basic skills and infrastructure to make an adequate living. Much has been written about the current and potential disruptive effects in advanced economies, of the suite of new technologies called the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)--a group of technologies that fuse digital, biological, and physical innovation in applications such as advanced robotics using artificial intelligence, CRISPR digital gene editing, and the networks of sensors and computers called the Internet of Things. Studies estimated that globally in the manufacturing sector alone, 4IR technologies could create 133 million jobs by the end of 2022, but displace 75 million jobs, leading to a net gain of 58 million jobs. Researchers have demonstrated that in the U.S., the skill-bias of technological change in the production sphere disproportionately affected routine and middle-skilled occupations, creating an asymmetry of opportunities, earnings, and income between lower and highly educated workers, and exacerbating inequality trends.

Did you miss a session at the Data Summit? Private investors are pouring more money into AI startups than ever before. At the same time, AI systems are becoming more affordable to train -- at least when it comes to certain tasks, like object classification. Troubling, though, language models in the same vein as OpenAI's GPT-3 are exhibiting greater bias and generating more toxic text than the simpler models that preceded them. Those are the top-level findings of the 2022 AI Index report out of Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), an academic research center focused on the human impact of AI technologies.

Using finely tuned hardware, a specialized network, and large data storage, supercomputers have long been used for computationally intense projects that require large amounts of data processing. With the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there is an increasing demand for these powerful computers and, as a result, processing power is rapidly increasing. As such, the growth of AI is inextricably linked to the growth in processing power of these high-performing devices. The term appeared in the late 1920s and the CDC 6600 (released in 1964) is generally considered to be the first true supercomputer. Early supercomputers used only a few extremely powerful processors but, in the late 1990s, computer experts realized that stringing together thousands of off-the-shelf processors would yield the greatest processing power.

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.

UK manufacturing firms will need to see their public and private investment in artificial intelligence increase, in order to remain competitive against rising economies focusing on the technology and to escape the cold shadow cast by the US and China. Although China and the US will likely be the key power players in AI-driven economies of the future, ascendant countries such as Singapore, Israel, Ireland and Finland pose significant competition for British firms, who are among other "traditional champions" of the technology like their Canadian, French and German counterparts. The data, which assessed the research performance, start-up funding and supercomputing prowess of 54 countries, is derived from the Global AI Index. It suggests a coming and radical power shift from economies that are "no longer defined by gross domestic product (GDP) or geography…[but] according to their capacity to take part in a global system shaped by artificial intelligence." The report looks at the impact of private investment in artificial intelligence, while also considering the critical role public, or state, finance can have on a country's global ranking.

Source: Capital IQ; Pitchbook; Deallogic; S&P; McKinsey Global Institute "Overall Europe is behind in private investments in Artificial Intelligence" AI strategy for Europe* * COM(2018)/237 Total VC Investments in Blockchain (2010-2018) • North America: $5,1 billion (Canada: $623 Mill.) • China: $1.5 billion • Europe: $1,2 billion (CH:$414 Mill.&

We are in the midst of an unprecedented surge of investment into artificial intelligence (AI) research and applications. Within that, discussions about'ethics' are taking centre stage to offset some of the potentially negative impacts of AI on society. Mona Sloane writes that to achieve a sustainable shift towards such fields, we need a more holistic approach to the relationship between technology, data, and society. In June 2018, the Mayor of London released a new report that identifies London's'unique strengths as a global hub of Artificial Intelligence' and positions the capital as'The AI Growth Capital of Europe'. This plea coincides with the government's focus on'AI & Data Economy' as the first out of four'Grand Challenges' to put the UK'at the forefront of the industries of the future'.

The European Commission published on April 25 2018 a Communication outlining the strategy of the EU for Artificial Intelligence. This post looks at the document, its structure and main points. While the first two chapters deal with a general introduction an AI scenarios and Europe's competitive posture in the international landscape (not great), the third part details the way forward the Commission is proposing and it's by far the most interesting. The first instinct, as always, is to throw money at the problem (the problem being Europe is lagging behind in this field, even if the first part of the document does not say it in so many words). So, in the paragraph titles somewhat pompously "Boosting the EU's technological and industrial capacity and AI uptake across the economy" an ambitious program of investments is outlines.