According to a comprehensive investigation report released by the United Nations, China has filed a total of 38,210 generative AI (AIGC) patents between 2014 and 2023, surpassing the United States by a factor of 6 and becoming the global leader in this field.
Specifically, China is at the forefront of global patent application activities in GenAI. Between 2014 and 2023, China was responsible for over 38,000 patent family publications based on the inventor addresses disclosed in patents. Since 2017, China has published more patents in this field each year than the sum of other countries. The United States had approximately 6,300 patents during the same period, ranking second as the second-largest research location in GenAI. Other Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, and India are also important research locations in GenAI, ranking in the top 5 globally (third, fourth, and fifth respectively).
Over the past 10 years, Tencent, Ping An Insurance Group, and Baidu have been the Chinese companies with the most GenAI patents. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (ranked 4th), Tsinghua University (ranked 15th), and Zhejiang University (ranked 16th) are the only research institutions in the top 20. Other Chinese companies that have made it into the top 20 include Alibaba Group (ranked 6th), ByteDance (ranked 9th), BBK Electronics (ranked 11th), NetEase (ranked 12th), Huawei (ranked 14th), China Mobile (ranked 17th), and State Grid (ranked 18th). U.S. companies with a high ranking in the GenAI patent family include IBM (fifth), Alphabet/Google (eighth), Microsoft (tenth), and Adobe (nineteenth).
Surprisingly, OpenAI has filed very few patents, having only disclosed 6 patents in the first quarter of 2024.
Generative AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence technologies that can generate new content through learning and imitating human creativity and thinking patterns, such as images, videos, audio, and text. In recent years, generative AI has experienced rapid development, driven by the emergence of the Transformer architecture in 2017 and the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI in 2022.
The leading position of China in the application of generative AI patents has also been recognized by academia and the media. China's top academic institutions and technology ecosystem provide strong support for the development of generative AI, while China also has a vast application space and scenario-based implementation, providing research and development momentum and a business atmosphere for enterprises.
Report access link: https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/patent-landscape-report-generative-artificial-intelligence-genai/index.html
Key Points:
🔸 China filed 38,210 generative AI patents between 2014 and 2023, more than six times the number of the United States.
🔸 Tencent, Ping An Insurance Group, and Baidu are the Chinese companies with the most GenAI patents.
🔸 China's top academic institutions and technology ecosystem provide strong support for the development of generative AI, and China's leading position in this field has been recognized by academia and the media.