China leads the U.S. as a top producer of research in more than half of AI’s hottest fields, according to new data from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) shared first with Axios. The findings reveal important nuances about the global race between the U.S. and China to lead AI advances and set crucial standards for the technology and how it is used around the world. CSET’s Emerging Technology Observatory team found global AI research more than doubled between 2017 and 2022. Roughly 32% of AI research focused on computer vision, which grew 121% in those five years. Natural language processing — what large language models do in ChatGPT and other generative AI tools — accounted for another 11% of AI papers and grew 104%. Research in robotics grew slower than in vision and natural language processing — by just 54% — and made up about 15% of all AI research. That tracks with the fact that anecdotally “a lot of the topics open in robotics have proven really hard to fix,” Zachary Arnold, the analytic lead for the CSET team, said. “At the same time, there has been very rapid progress in language tasks, for example.” And AI safety research made up just 2% of all research, despite growing 315% between 2017 and 2022. “The fact that research is growing so quickly, in so many directions, underscores the need for federal investment in basic measurement evaluation on the scientific techniques we need to ensure that AI getting deployed in the real world is safe, secure and understandable,” said Arnold. But appropriations for the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, which is tasked with identifying those measurements, were recently cut.

Full report : China tops the U.S. on AI research in over half of the hottest fields.