Identifying and measuring developments in artificial intelligence : making the impossible possible

This paper identifies and measures developments in science, algorithms and technologies related to artificial intelligence (AI). Using information from scientific publications, open source software (OSS) and patents, it finds a marked increase in AI-related developments over recent years. Since 2015, AI-related publications have increased by 23% per year; from 2014 to 2018, AI-related OSS contributions grew at a rate three times greater than other OSS contributions; and AI-related inventions comprised, on average, more than 2.3% of IP5 patent families in 2017. China’s growing role in the AI space also emerges. The analysis relies on a three-pronged approach based on established bibliometric and patent-based methods, and machine learning (ML) implemented on purposely collected OSS data.