Hidden inside the foundation of popular artificial intelligence (AI) image generators are thousands of images of child sexual abuse, according to new research published on Wednesday. The operators of some of the largest and most-used sets of images utilized to train AI shut off access to them in response to the study. The Stanford Internet Observatory found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the giant AI database LAION, an index of online images and captions that's been used to train leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion. The watchdog group based at Stanford University worked with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities to identify the illegal material and report the original photo links to law enforcement. More than 1,000 of the suspected images were confirmed as child sexual abuse material.

No, AI isn't going to take your job. As I've written, the best uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) complement human creativity rather than supplant it. People and robots are going to peacefully coexist for the foreseeable future. Even so, some industries are more aggressively embracing AI than others, as revealed in the newest 2022 AI Index Report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. During the past year, virtually every industry has increased its investments in AI-savvy people, with even higher AI-centric job postings from companies in the following industries: information (5.3%); professional, scientific, and technical services (4.1%); and finance and insurance (3.3%).

DIGITAL SME continues to lead the way in creating a European AI community and has joined an EU-funded Blueprint project ARISA to support the implementation of the Pact for Skills by developing a sectoral skills strategy on Artificial Intelligence to help EU's ambitious goals of Europe s Digital Decade programme. This project kicks off at a time, when, as according to the DIGITAL SME Secretary-General Sebastiano Toffaletti, "SMEs in Europe are often struggling to find staff that is adequately skilled to work with such technologies as AI. The recent Stanford Report on AI has also shown that 34% of all enteprises acknowledge the that gap in AI skills hinder AI adoption in their companies. This trend will only intensify as the need for the adoption of AI solutions has increased dramatically in the past decade. ARISA is a great opportunity for tackling this challenge by working together in creating a common sectoral skills strategy for AI skills and providing Europeans with tools to upskill."

Artificial intelligence is becoming a true industry, with all the pluses and minuses that entails, according to a sweeping new report.Why it matters: AI is now in nearly every area of business, with the pandemic pushing even more investment in drug design and medicine. But as the technology matures, challenges around ethics and diversity grow.Stay on top of the latest market trends and economic insights with Axios Markets. Subscribe for freeDriving the news: This morning, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index, a top overview of the current state of the field.A majority of North American AI Ph.D.s — 65% — now go into industry, up from 44% in 2010, a sign of the growing role that large companies are playing both in AI research and implementation."The striking thing to me is that AI is moving from a research phase to much more of an industrial practice," says Erik Brynjolfsson, a senior fellow at HAI and director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.By the numbers: Even with the pandemic, private AI investment grew by 9.3% in 2020, a bigger increase than in 2019.For the third year in a row, however, the number of newly funded companies decreased, a sign that "we're moving from pure research and exploratory small startups to industrial-stage companies," says Brynjolfsson.While academia remains the single-biggest source worldwide for peer-reviewed AI papers, corporate-affiliated research now represents nearly a fifth of all papers in the U.S., making it the second-biggest source.The drug and medical industries took in by far the biggest share of overall AI private investment in 2020, absorbing more than $13.8 billion — 4.5 times greater than in 2019 and nearly three times more than the next category of autonomous vehicles.The catch: While the field has experienced sudden busts in the past — the "AI winters" that vaporized funding — there's little indication such a collapse is on the horizon. But industrialization comes with its own growing pains.Cutting-edge AI increasingly requires huge amounts of computing and data, which puts more power in the hands of fewer big players.Conversely, the commoditization of AI technologies like facial recognition means more players in the field, both domestically and internationally, which makes it more difficult to regulate their use. As AI grows, the ethical challenges embedded in the field — and the fact that 45% of new AI Ph.D.s are white, compared to just about 2% who are Black — will mean "there's a new frontier of potential privacy violations and other abuses," says Brynjolfsson.The AI Index found that while the field of AI ethics is growing, the interest level of big companies is still "disappointingly small," says Brynjolfsson.Details: Those growing pains are at play in one of the most exciting applications in AI today: massive text-generating models. Systems like OpenAI's GPT-3, released last year, swallow hundreds of billions of words along the way to producing original text that can be eerily human-like in its execution.Text-generating AI models could help polish human-written resumes for job search, but could also potentially be used to spam corporate competitors with realistic computer-generated applicants, not to mention warp our shared reality."What we increasingly have with these models is a double-edged sword," says Kristin Tynski, a co-founder and senior VP at Fractl, a data-driven marketing company.What to watch: The growing geopolitical AI competition between the U.S. and China.The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence warned in a major report this week that "China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.""We don’t have to go to war with China," former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired the committee that authored the report, told my Axios colleague Ina Fried. "We do need to be competitive."Yes, but: While researchers in China publish the most AI papers, the U.S. still leads on quality, according to the Stanford survey.And while a majority of AI Ph.D.s in the U.S. are from abroad, more than 80% remain in the country when they take jobs — a sign of the lasting attraction of the U.S. tech sector.The bottom line: AI still has a long way to go, but the challenges the field faces are shifting from what it can do to what it should do.Like this article? Get more from Axios and subscribe to Axios Markets for free.

Artificial intelligence is becoming a true industry, with all the pluses and minuses that entails, according to a sweeping new report. Why it matters: AI is now in nearly every area of business, with the pandemic pushing even more investment in drug design and medicine. But as the technology matures, challenges around ethics and diversity grow. Driving the news: This morning, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) released its annual AI Index, a top overview of the current state of the field. By the numbers: Even with the pandemic, private AI investment grew by 9.3% in 2020, a bigger increase than in 2019.

The health care industry is in the business of performing miracles. Whether giving sight to the blind, helping the paralyzed walk or sequencing genes to stave off disease, today's doctors and surgeons are saving and improving lives in new ways. Society is blessed to have geniuses wearing stethoscopes and lab coats. Despite immense progress, the health care industry still struggles to answer its most pressing questions. How do we help more people live longer, healthier lives?

No longer the subject of science fiction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is profoundly transforming our daily lives. While computers have been mimicking human intelligence already for some decades using logic and if-then kind of rules, massive increases in computational power are now facilitating the creation of'deep learning' machines i.e. algorithms that permit software to train itself to recognize patterns and perform tasks, like speech and image recognition, through exposure to vast amounts of data. These deep learning algorithms are everywhere, shaping our preferences and behaviour. Facebook uses a set of algorithms to tailor what news stories an individual user sees and in what order. Bot activity on Twitter last year suppressed a protest against Mexico's now-president by overloading the hashtag used to organize the event.

Have you seen sci-fi movies like A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a 2001 US science fiction drama directed by Steven Spielberg that portrays a childlike android programmed to love, or Bicentennial Man, which starred the late Robin Williams and was based on a 1976 novel by Isaac Asimov? Have you seen the movie Surrogates which starred Bruce Willis and portrayed a futuristic world where people live within the safety of their homes while their robotic surrogates carry on their daily chores? If yes, you are also likely to believe that machines endowed with artificial intelligence (AI) can emulate, or even surpass, human intelligence. However, nothing can be further from the truth, say researchers. "The frightening, futurist portrayals of artificial intelligence that dominate films and novels, and shape the popular imagination, are fictional… Unlike in the movies, there is no race of superhuman robots on the horizon or probably even possible," insists a Stanford University-hosted report.

For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now five of the world's largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of A.I. to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of A.I. on jobs, transportation and even warfare. Tech companies have long overpromised what artificially intelligent machines can do.

For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway. Now five of the world's largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of A.I. to humans, researchers at Google's parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of A.I. on jobs, transportation and even warfare. Tech companies have long overpromised what artificially intelligent machines can do.