The bar chart titled “Global total corporate artificial intelligence (AI) investment from 2015 to 2022” was published by statista in 2023 with data collected by Stanford University, S&P Capital IQ, Crunchbase and NetBase Quid. The bars represent the investment in billion USD. There is a mean positive development from 2015 to 2022. Furthermore, there are 3 periods with stagnation divided by sharp growth.
The first period, starting from 2015 to 2016, sees an increase of around 40% which only adds up to around 5 billion dollars. Then there’s an enourmous climb to the second period between 2017 and 2019, jumping from 17.7 billion USD in 2016 to 44.08 billion USD in 2017, which is an increase of about one hundred percent.
The following period, regardless of having the highest increase between 2 years, has the lowest overall mean increase, growing about 9% from 2017 to 2019 with a small drop in 2018.
In 2020, which marks the beginning member of the 3rd period, there’s a significant increase of 19 billion USD, representing a small grow before the 2021 peak. Now, the total investment jumps up by 26 billion USD to 93.5 billion USD. This is also the all-time high on the chart, with the 2022 number declining slightly by 1.6 billion USD.
In conclusion, the overall development reveals that there has to be some sort of driving factor for big changes; there’s a clear pattern of high jump, stagnation or slight decline and then rinse and repeat. It also shows that AI is becoming more important overall since there is a clear mean positive development over the years, like already mentioned. In addition to this, the 2020 and 2021 jumps can be explained by OpenAI releasing GPT-3 a.k.a. ChatGPT in 2020 and releasing their generative image model DALL-E in 2021, revolutionizing and more importantly popularizing the AI industry.