According to an in-depth survey report released by the United Nations, China applied for generative AI (AIGC）patentThe number reached 38,210, six times that of the United States, making it the world's leading country.
Specifically, China is at the forefront of GenAI's global patent application activity. Between 2014 and 2023, China was responsible for more than 38,000 patent family publications based on the inventor addresses published on the patents. Since 2017, China has published more patents in this field each year than all other countries combined. Between 2014 and 2023, the United States had a total of about 6,300 patents, making it the second largest research location for GenAI. Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan and India are also important research locations for GenAI, all ranking in the top 5 in the world (third, fourth and fifth, respectively).
Tencent, Ping An Insurance Group and Baidu are the Chinese companies with the most GenAI patents in the past 10 years. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (4th), Tsinghua University (15th) and Zhejiang University (16th) are the only research institutions in the top 20. Alibaba Group (6th), ByteDance (9th), BBK Electronics (11th), NetEase (12th), Huawei (14th), China Mobile (17th) and State Grid (18th) are other Chinese companies in the top 20. IBM (5th), Alphabet/Google (8th), Microsoft (10th) and Adobe (19th) are the top US companies in GenAI patent families.
Over the past 10 years, the number of published patent families in the GenAI model has increased from less than 800 in 2014 to more than 14,000 in 2023. Patent activity surged starting in 2017, with an average annual increase of about 451 TP3T since then. This coincides with the launch of the Transformer in 2017. Between 2014 and 2023, patent searches identified a total of 54,358 patent families published in the GenAI field. At the end of 2023, about 891 TP3T (48,398 patent families) were considered active in this patent dataset.
Surprisingly, OpenAI has applied for surprisingly few patents, with only 6 patents published in the first quarter of 2024.
Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence technology that can generate new content, such as images, videos, audio, and text, by learning and imitating human creativity and thinking. In the past few years, generative AI has developed rapidly, with two important driving factors being the emergence of the Transformer architecture in 2017 and ChatGPT released by OpenAI in 2022.
China's leading position in generative AI patent applications 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. At the same time, China also has a broad application space and scenario-based implementation, providing R&D motivation and business atmosphere for enterprises.
Report address: https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/patent-landscape-report-generative-artificial-intelligence-genai/index.html