2017 will be remembered as the year artificial intelligence (AI) went mainstream. From integration in high-level business platforms, social media, medical and scientific research to smartphone camera and home assistants, AI was one of the most used words of 2017.

However, despite people like Elon Musk pointing out of an existential threat arising from AI, and playing Go and jeopardy better than a human, AI is still in its nascent state, according to researchers at Stanford University.

In order to track the progress of AI, Stanford researchers have launched an index called AI100. The index will provide "a comprehensive baseline on the state of artificial intelligence and measure technological progress in the same way the gross domestic product and the S&P 500 index track the U.S. economy and the broader stock market, " says Stanford's Andrew Myers.

According to Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering and the faculty director of AI100, "the AI100 effort realized that in order to supplement its regular review of AI, a more continuous set of collected metrics would be incredibly useful."

The researchers pointed out that, "the AI Index tracks and measures at least 18 independent vectors in academia, industry, open-source software and public interest, plus technical assessments of progress toward what the authors call “human-level performance in areas such as speech recognition, question-answering and computer vision – algorithms that can identify objects and activities in 2D images".

However, many of them don't seem to agree with the current AI hype. According to Yoav Shoham, professor emeritus of computer science, “AI has made truly amazing strides in the past decade, but computers still can’t exhibit the common sense or the general intelligence of even a 5-year-old.”

The AI100 index also found out that there has been a 14-fold increase in AI startups since 2000, while venture capital investment rose six times during in the same period.