The United Nations has announced that inventors in China have submitted most global patent applications for generative AI innovations, which have seen an eightfold increase worldwide since 2017.
A report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) highlights a significant acceleration in this field. Last year alone, a quarter of the total generative AI patent applications from the past decade, totalling 54,000, were submitted. Daren Tang, head of WIPO, referred to generative AI as a “revolutionary technology.”
This technology gained widespread attention following the free release of “ChatGPT” at the end of 2022, although neural networks are now synonymous with AI, they first emerged in 2017.
Generative AI Advancements
Since then, generative AI programs, trained with billions of data points, have become capable of creating text, videos, audio, and code in seconds, based on simple language prompts. Currently, patents related to generative AI innovations account for only 6% of all AI patents worldwide, but the number of applications is growing rapidly.
AI Technology Boom
Christopher Harrison, head of patent studies at WIPO, described the field as “booming.” Generative AI powers a range of industrial and consumer products, including chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It also plays a role in designing new molecules for drug development and enhancing product design.
WIPO’s report underscores China’s remarkable vitality in this domain. Between 2014 and 2023, Chinese entities submitted over 38,000 patent applications for generative AI innovations, out of a total of 54,000. This figure is six times higher than the 6,276 applications from the United States, which ranks second. South Korea is third with 4,155 applications, followed by Japan with 3,409.
India, with 1,350 applications, showed the highest growth in AI-related patent filings. Chinese companies and institutions dominate the list of applicants, with Tencent at the top, followed by Ping An Insurance, Baidu, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
American firm IBM ranks fifth, followed by China’s Alibaba, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, and Alphabet, Google’s parent company.
Moreover, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, and Microsoft round out the top ten.
Technology and Innovation: A Double-Edged Sword?
Daren Tang noted that the report aims to provide an overview of early-stage developments to better predict future trends. He acknowledged certain risks associated with generative AI, such as job losses and intellectual property violations.
Furthermore, Tang stated that if this technology “undermines human creativity and prevents a human innovator from earning a living, that is something we need to pay attention to,” expressing hope that developers of generative AI models and content creators can find common ground and emphasizing that such revolutionary technology should keep humans “at the heart of the innovation system.”
