Since launching our talent tracker in 2020, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. Ostensible breakthroughs in large language models and machine learning methods, as well as staggering improvements in compute capabilities, have made the power and potential of AI demonstrably clear.
While companies and institutions are racing to monetize the power of AI, the prospect of its full potential is also giving pause to governments around the world. Much uncertainty centers on how to balance AI’s power to solve a range of economic and social problems with curtailing the downsides of its potential.
But what’s certain is that a large chunk of the tech world’s capital and talent will be deployed toward bringing AI applications to the real world. If anything, the competition among countries in this arena will be fiercer than ever—and much of that competition will be over the indispensable input of an AI ecosystem: talent.
Talent also happens to be one of the most clearly quantifiable inputs, which is why we are assessing the global balance and flow of top AI researchers and scientists. Now, after three years of a pandemic and amid geopolitical ructions, how has that balance of talent changed?
To compare apples to apples, this 2023 update, like the previous version, uses the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NeurIPS) as our sample. For its December 2022 conference, NeurIPS accepted a record-breaking 2,671 papers with an acceptance rate of 25.6%, compared with 1,428 papers and an acceptance rate of 21.6% in 2019.
While the conference has expanded in numbers, it is still considered one of the most selective AI conferences on record, meaning that it is a good proxy for the top-tier (top ~20%) of AI research talent. Rather than examining a broader slice of AI talent, we choose to focus on the top-tier because we believe this cohort is the most likely to lead the way on research breakthroughs as well as on determining novel use cases in the commercial domain.
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