These AI firms produce the world's most cited research

 By the CogX R&I team

August 7, 2024

The Private-sector AI-Related Activity Tracker (PARAT), run by the Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO), has released updated data on AI trends, assessing publications, patents, and job metrics from major players worldwide.

Source: Nature. Using data from PARAT/ETO.

Key findings from the tracker:

• US tech giants Alphabet and Microsoft lead in producing highly cited AI research papers.

  
  

• Chinese firms Baidu and Tencent are ahead in AI patent filings.

  
  

• Three Chinese tech giants - Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei - feature in the top ten for highly cited AI papers.

  
  

• Amazon tops the AI job market with 14,000 positions, closely followed by consulting firm Accenture.

  
  

The most cited AI paper of all time, "Attention is all you need", comes from Google researchers and introduces the transformer architecture now powering many generative AI models.

Now read the rest of the CogX Newsletter

OpenAI co-founder departs for rival Anthropic

OpenAI's talent exodus continues as another co-founder departs. John Schulman, a key architect of the ChatGPT chatbot, has left the AI powerhouse to join rival Anthropic, marking the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the company.

If this sounds like déjà vu, you're not imagining things. Schulman's departure is just the latest in a string of high-profile exits. Hot on the heels of Ilya Sutskever (another co-founder and former chief scientist) jumping ship with his team, it's hard not to see a pattern.

What's driving the departures? While Schulman cites a desire to focus more deeply on AI alignment research, his move comes amidst ongoing turbulence at OpenAI. The company has faced criticism over its rapid AI development pace and research direction, concerns that came to a head during last November's boardroom crisis.

What does this mean for OpenAI? With Schulman's departure, only three of the company's 11 original founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba. Despite the losses, OpenAI continues to thrive financially, recently reaching an $86 billion valuation.

And what about the competition? Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI researchers, seems to be the primary beneficiary of this talent migration. Billing itself as putting "safety at the frontier" of its work, the startup is attracting those interested in AI alignment and safety research.

Other people moves

After departing Alphabet in 2021 to co-found the chatbot sensation Character.AI, Noam Shazeer is now returning to his roots, bringing along key team members and granting Google a licence to the startup's technology.

Winni Wintermeyer for The Washington Post—Getty Images

Midjourney's latest update, V6.1, packs a surprising punch

This upgrade delivers major improvements in human likeness, text clarity, and image upscaling. To access it, simply append –v 6.1 to the end of a prompt:

An AI dilemma
OpenAI has developed a tool to identify text generated by ChatGPT with 99.9% certainty  — but according to The Wall Street Journal, the company has held off on releasing it due to ethical concerns.

Also in the news

Elon Musk sues OpenAI again: The billionaire entrepreneur filed a new lawsuit accusing his former co-founders, including Sam Altman, of betraying his vision for the company. Musk claims that OpenAI's shift from a non-profit to a for-profit entity violates the company's original mission.

Nvidia's next-gen AI chips face production setbacks: Design flaws could cause a delay of up to three months in the launch of the chip giant's highly anticipated Blackwell chip series.

Google has an illegal monopoly on search? In a landmark ruling, a federal judge has declared Google search a monopoly, finding the company guilty of violating antitrust laws. Google has announced plans to appeal the decision.

In case you missed it

Watch this bloomberg special on how Mark Zuckerberg plans to win the AI race: