The globalisation and industrialisation of artificial intelligence deepened in 2021, as did the ethical and regulatory issues surrounding it, according to the 2022 AI Index, an annual study of AI impact and progress at the  Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI).

The new report showed key advances in AI in 2021: 

• Private investment in AI has more than doubled since 2020, in part due to larger funding rounds.
• AI has become more affordable and higher performing. The cost to train an image classification has decreased by 63.6% and training times have improved by 94.4% since 2018. 
• The United States and China have the greatest number of cross-country collaborations in AI papers in the last decade, producing 2.7 times more joint papers in 2021 than between the United Kingdom and China—the second-highest on the list.
• The number of AI patents filed has soared—more than 30 times higher than in 2015, showing a compound annual growth rate of 76.9%.

The report also highlighted growing research and concerns on ethical issues as well as regulatory interests: 

• Large language and multimodal language-vision models are excelling on technical benchmarks, but just as their performance increases, so do their ethical issues.
• Research on fairness and transparency in AI has exploded since 2014, with a fivefold increase in publications on related topics over the past four years.
• The industry has increased its involvement in AI ethics, with 71% more publications affiliated with the industry at top conferences from 2018 to 2021. 
• The United States has seen a sharp increase in the number of proposed bills related to AI; lawmakers proposed 130 laws in 2021, compared with just 1 in 2015. However, the number of bills passed remains low, with only 2% ultimately becoming law in the past six years.
• Globally, AI regulation continues to expand. Since 2015, 18 times more bills related to AI were passed into law in legislatures of 25 countries around the world and mentions of AI in legislative proceedings also grew 7.7 times in the past six years.