1. AI beats humans on some tasks, but not on all. AI has surpassed human performance on several benchmarks, including some in image classification, visual reasoning, and English understanding. Yet it trails behind on more complex tasks like competition-level mathematics, visual commonsense reasoning and planning.
2. Industry continues to dominate frontier AI research. In 2023, industry produced 51 notable ML models, while academia contributed only 15. There were also 21 notable models resulting from industry-academia collaborations in 2023, a new high.
3. Frontier models get a lot more expensive. According to AI Index estimates, the training costs of state-of-the-art AI models have reached unprecedented levels.
4. The United States leads China, the EU, and the U.K. as the leading source of top AI models.
5. Robust and standardised evaluations for LLM responsibility are seriously lacking. New research from the AI Index reveals a significant lack of standardisation in responsible AI reporting. Leading developers, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, primarily test their models against different responsible AI benchmarks. This practice complicates efforts to systematically compare the risks and limitations of top AI models.
6. Generative AI investment skyrockets. Despite a decline in overall AI private investment last year, funding for generative AI surged.
7. The data is in: AI makes workers more productive and leads to higher quality work. In 2023, several studies assessed AI’s impact on labor, suggesting that AI enables workers to complete tasks more quickly and to improve the quality of their output. These studies also demonstrated AI’s potential to bridge the skill gap between low- and high-skilled workers. Other studies caution that using AI without proper oversight can lead to diminished performance.
8. Scientific progress accelerates even further, thanks to AI. In 2022, AI began to advance scientific discovery. 2023, however, saw the launch of even more significant science-related AI applications.
9. The number of AI regulations in the United States sharply increases. The number of AI regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years.
10. People across the globe are more cognisant of AI’s potential impact—and more nervous. A survey from Ipsos shows that, over the last year, the proportion of those who think AI will dramatically affect their lives in the next 3-5 years has increased from 60% to 66%. 52% express nervousness toward AI products and services, marking a 13% rise from 2022.

The most staggering part of this report is that it doesn’t even cover 2024, which has already seen major model advances like Claude 3, Llama 3, and more to come. As quickly as things are moving, each year is likely going to be magnitudes crazier — whether the world is ready or not.

Read the full report here