We live in a complex world, rich with data and insights, where finding our way is becoming increasingly challenging. As Herbert Simon wrote back in the 1950s, ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’. And when there’s a dearth of attention, knowing where to look becomes an uphill battle.
Nowhere is this truer than in the burgeoning world of AI. New policies and standards are emerging every day. Large corporations update their models, while startups secure funding to drive innovation. Scientific collaboration spans across continents, researchers tap into software and data swaths to achieve new breakthroughs, all while business leaders form alliances and politicians ponder their next moves. All this in a frantic effort to ride the wave of the most powerful general-purpose technology of the past few decades.
For businesses, policymakers and investors, understanding the AI revolution requires improved skills in locating, processing and analysing data to detect patterns and forecast trends.
And even if they do find the data, understanding what it means often requires guidance, analysis and easy access to technical and non-technical explanations. After all, knowing where we are is a key prerequisite for understanding where we’re going.
To bridge this knowledge gap, CEPS has created a large-scale data platform called AI World. It’s a ‘one-stop-shop’ for all things AI, from insights on market developments, and leading companies and locations, to emerging applications and techniques.
It covers the ‘what’, the ‘why’, the ‘how’, the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of the AI revolution, with data on more than 190 locations, 160 sectors, dozens of companies, technologies and people, case studies, products and models, and over a thousand regulations spanning the globe.
We designed AI World with ‘question science’ in mind. We’re aware that simply piling up data on a single website doesn’t help to reduce complexity. That’s why every webpage on AI world is designed with key prompts in mind.
With AI World, we want to empower policymakers to understand which regions are leading on AI, in which sectors and how their regions and countries perform compared to others. They can pinpoint areas for collaboration and even tackle trade negotiations with new insights. They can more easily approach the deepening of AI adoption in industrial ecosystems – a challenge that has been clearly identified by several recent high-level reports, such as Mario Draghi’s on the future of European competitiveness.
On AI World, business leaders can access sector-specific playbooks, enhancing their knowledge on industry-focused AI applications, case studies and best practices to accelerate AI uptake. Large corporations can monitor market trends and spot possible partners along the value chain, while startups can locate potential collaborators, funding opportunities, market and tech trends.
Likewise, investors can identify high-potential startups, technologies, sectors or regions to help guide investment decisions. Students and scholars will find trusted sources of high-quality, up-to-date data to inspire their research and class materials, while NGOs will be able to identify and address emerging issues in responsible AI. Finally, media outlets will have easy access to the data they need to stay up to speed with AI World’s pervasive, breathtaking development.
As data and social scientists, we know that a lot of potential can come from cross-analysing data and enabling future predictions. That’s why AI World includes a new section on skills mapping, career path guidance and a marketplace for future jobs. This will allow us to engage in skills prediction and undertake effective monitoring in a variety of sectors, and for several AI use cases over the coming months. This is a game-changing feature, as locating and retaining the right skills is rightly seen as a key priority by policymakers around the world – including here in Europe.
AI World sets off on its journey on 11 December. A journey that will see us improve, refine and enrich our platform every day over the coming years.
For this, we’ll need to cultivate exciting partnerships, such as our recently-announced one with Hugging Face, the leading platform for hosting and collaborating on AI models, datasets, and applications. And we’ll need the help of our end users, who can contribute data, insights, analysis and the scarcest resource we face today – the ground-breaking questions of our age, which AI World will be able to help answer.
To find out more about AI World, click here.
