In terms of generative AI, China has applied for considerably more patents than any other nation, according to a U.N. intellectual property office report released on Wednesday. The United States is far behind.
The World Intellectual Property Organization stated that between 2010 to 2023, technology was connected to almost 54,000 inventions. While technology has the ability to increase productivity and accelerate scientific discoveries, it also raises worries about jobs and labor.
Since generative AI shot to prominence in late 2022, more than a quarter of those inventions have been made, according to WIPO. This is evidence of the technology’s exponential growth and interest.
This is the first patent report of its sort, and it tracks patent applications to see if they might reveal trends in artificial intelligence. It ignores artificial intelligence in its broader sense, which encompasses technologies like autonomous driving and facial recognition, and concentrates only on generative AI.
According to WIPO Director-General Daren Tang, the organization wants to provide everyone with a clearer knowledge of where this rapidly developing technology is being developed and going.
China produced more than 38,200 of the innovations in generative AI during the ten years that began in 2014. Six times as many come from that country as from the US, which had about 6,300. Following them were India with 1,350, South Korea with 4,155, and Japan with almost 3,400.
With the aid of tools like Google Gemini, Ernie from China’s Baidu, ChatGPT from OpenAI, and Google Gemini, GenAI assists users in creating writing, photos, music, and other types of content. Numerous industries have used the technology, including the life sciences, manufacturing, transportation, security, and telecommunications.
Critics worry that GenAI might be used to take the place of humans in some jobs or that it might inappropriately take human-generated content without paying creators fairly or sufficiently.
As with other categories of patent applications, GenAI patent number does not necessarily translate into quality, according to WIPO authorities. It’s difficult to predict which patents will be valuable on the market or revolutionize society at this early stage in the technology.
Tang stated, “Let’s observe how the data and the developments unfold over time.”
Although China and the United States are sometimes viewed as competitors in the development of artificial intelligence, American tech companies are really leading the globe in the creation of the most advanced AI systems.
According to Nestor Maslej, a research manager at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, “looking at patents just paints one part of a narrative.” He also mentioned that patent clearance rates can differ based on national regulations.
According to Maslej, who edits Stanford’s yearly AI Index evaluating the state of technology, when you look at AI vibrancy, a very significant question is who’s releasing the best models and where those models are coming from. At least by that criterion, it seems like the United States is pretty far ahead.
In 2023, U.S.-based institutions produced sixty-one noteworthy machine-learning models, surpassing the 21 from the European Union and the 15 from China, as per the AI Index for the year. France had the most, eight, among the EU’s member states.
The United States also possesses the greatest number of “AI foundation models,” which include the enormous, adaptable, and extensively trained GPT-4 model from OpenAI, Claude 3 from Anthropic, and Llama from Meta.
China has dominated in industrial robotics, but the U.S. has led China in both the amount of newly established AI firms and private AI investments.
