The Global AI Talent Tracker
Marco Polo
Countries, companies, and institutions around the world are
mobilizing to apply the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to an
enormous range of economic and social problems. That application
requires bringing together several key inputs: research and engineering
talent, data, computational power, and a healthy innovation ecosystem.
Talent is one of the most important—and the most clearly quantifiable—of
those inputs.
To assess the global balance and flow of top AI scientists we focused
on what many consider the top AI conference for deep learning: Neural
Information Processing Systems, a.k.a. NeurIPS. For its December 2019
conference, NeurIPS saw a record-breaking 15,920 researchers submit
6,614 papers, with a paper acceptance rate of 21.6%, making it one of
the largest, most popular, and most selective AI conferences on record.
We created a unique and rich dataset of researchers with papers
accepted at NeurIPS 2019, using that as a proxy for the top-tier
(approximately top 20%) of AI research talent (see detailed methodology).
We chose to focus on top-tier AI researchers because we believe this
cohort is the most likely to lead the way on new areas of potentially
breakthrough research as well as to apply AI to highly complex
real-world problems.
The United States has a large lead over all other countries in top-tier
AI research, with nearly 60% of top-tier researchers working for
American universities and companies. The US lead is built on attracting
international talent, with more than two-thirds of the top-tier AI
researchers working in the United States having received undergraduate
degrees in other countries.
China is the largest source of top-tier researchers, with 29% of these
researchers having received undergraduate degrees in China. But the
majority of those Chinese researchers (56%) go on to study, work, and
live in the United States. Over half (53%) of all the top-tier AI researchers are immigrants or
foreign nationals currently working in a different country from where
they received their undergraduate degrees.
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