Trend Frontier AI research has shifted from academia to industry

Summary

This trend describes the centre of cutting-edge AI research moving from universities to private companies. Citing Stanford's 2024 AI Index, the report finds that industry built 51 notable machine learning models in 2023 while academia produced only 15, even as 21 models came from joint work. Industry also takes 67% of AI funding in the EU, hires 70% of AI-specialised PhD graduates in the US and produces 96% of large AI models, up from 11% in 2010. The high cost of training frontier models, running from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, leaves academic institutions struggling to keep pace. The report treats this shift as the starting point for the research gaps it identifies and calls for giving public research the infrastructure to work independently.