The AI Revolution: Tracking Interest through Wikipedia’s Insights
From Theory to Reality: Unraveling the Surge of Interest in Artificial Intelligence Through Wikipedia’s Insights. Artificial Intelligence has caused excitement and fears all around us more so recently as Chat GPT has grabbed the attention of everyone from students to doctors. It is truly ground-breaking what Chat GPT can do from writing essays to producing functioning code in a blink of an eye it has most certainly stirred the pot within the tech community and interest in machine learning. So how can we track people’s interests in artificial intelligence? Wikipedia is the epicenter of information if someone wants a TLDR of any topic Wikipedia is the place to go. Wikipedia can also be used to track views of certain pages and can also track the number of times a page has been edited. That is one way where we can track people’s interest in certain topics. So what causes people’s interest in AI that causes them to pursue more information regarding machine learning?
A quick analysis of the number of page views and a number of revisions shows that there are clear spikes in the number of viewers and the number of revisions that can correlate with events surrounding artificial intelligence.
We can see in the chart showing the number of page reviews, we can see very large spikes in late 2016 and early 2019. Most people including myself have not heard too much information about artificial intelligence until Chat GPT was introduced. So why is there such a large spike almost seven years before GPT 3 was introduced? World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that in 2016 there were a total of 167,038 patents for machine learning were filed. There has also been a noticeable decrease in the ratio of scientific papers to inventions, from 8:1 in 2010 to 3:1 in 2016. This change is believed to reflect a shift from theoretical research towards the utilization of AI technologies in the development of commercial products and services. So in 2016, there was a shift from AI being this theoretical idea to shifting towards more of an actual product and service. This could be a direct result of an increased view count in 2016.
In 2019 artificial intelligence took massive leaps, in 2019 GPT 2 was introduced which laid the groundwork for GPT 3. As of 2019, modern statistical techniques, including analyzing co-occurrence frequencies, employing keyword spotting, and utilizing transformer-based deep learning, have made significant advancements in generating coherent text to the point where they can generate coherent text like pages or paragraphs. Also in 2019, WIPO reported that AI had the highest number of patent applications and granted patents among emerging technologies. 2019 was huge for artificial intelligence there were significant advancements made in this field, marking a substantial leap forward in its development that could have caused an increase in views.
What surprised me the most was that you would think the number of views trends and patterns would be similar to the number of revisions made but after a quick analysis there is no relationship between the two at all.
Up until about 2022, there have not been more than 150 revisions made at a single time until late 2022 which is around the same time Chat GPT was introduced. We can see some growth in views around the time Chat Gpt was introduced but not like the spikes we saw in 2016 and in 2019. This puzzled me there were ground-breaking developments within artificial intelligence way before Chat GPT was introduced so why was that the cause of such a massive spike in revisions? That could just be due to how fast Chat GPT grew and how fast new information came from it and many revisions were needed to keep up with its growth. That could just be left to speculation.
Artificial intelligence has created excitement and interest, particularly with the emergence of technologies like Chat GPT. Wikipedia serves as a valuable source for tracking people’s interests in AI. Significant spikes in page views in 2016 and 2019 could be attributed to shifts in research and the introduction of GPT 2 and GPT 3. However, there is no direct correlation between page views and revisions. Nonetheless, artificial intelligence continues to make groundbreaking advancements, shaping the future of technology and society, and continues to spark interest in people all over the world.
