Natural language processing, a subfield that has been actively explored since the 1950s, is slowly making progress in English language understanding,, inferring reasonable outcomes, identifying emotional context, speech recognition and transcription, and translation. For basic reading comprehension, AI can perform better than humans, but when language tasks get more complicated, like when interpreting context clues is necessary, humans still have an edge.
As AI appears to have become better at doing what we want it to do, the cost to train it has come down as well, dropping by over 60 percent since 2018. Meanwhile, a system that would’ve taken 6 minutes to train in 2018 would now only take a little over 13 seconds. Accounting for hardware costs, in 2021, an image classification system would take less than $5 to train, whereas that cost would’ve been over $1,000 in 2017.
Private investment in AI is at an all-time high, totalling $93.5 billion in 2021 . AI companies that were skilled in “data management, processing, and cloud,” according to the report, got the most funding in 2021, followed by companies dedicated to “medical and healthcare” and financial technology .In fiscal year 2021, US government agencies spent $1.53 billion on AI research and development for non-defense purposes, which was 2.7 times the amount spent in fiscal year 2018.