China leads in generative AI patents

The inventors of China filed the vast majority of international patent applications for innovations using the generative artificial intelligencewhose total number worldwide has increased eightfold since 2017, the UN announced on Wednesday.

The acceleration is very fast and A quarter of the 54,000 patents filed over the past decade for generative AI innovations were filed last year,the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said in a report.

Generative artificial intelligence, called GenAI, “has become a revolutionary technology,” said WIPO Director Daren Tang.

The world discovered this technology at the end of 2022, when access to ChatGPT was opened even though this conversational system has been around since 2017.

These computer programs fed and “trained” by billions of data They can create text, video, music and code in just a few seconds.

GenAI patents They only represent 6% of all AI patents in the world but the number of applications is growing rapidly.

“It’s a booming sector,” says Christopher Harrison, WIPO’s head of patent analysis.

This technology is powering new industrial and consumer products, including chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

It can also contribute to the design of new molecules for drug development and enable the design and optimization of new products.

Innovation

The report highlights China’s great vitality. Between 2014 and 2023, out of a total of 54,000 GenAI patents, more than 38,000 came from Chinaa figure six times higher than the United States, which ranks second with 6,276.

South Korea is in third place with 4,155, followed by Japan with 3,409. India, where 1,350 GenAI patents have been filed, is the fastest growing country.

By company, Chinese companies are in the lead. Tencent leads the list, followed by Ping An Insurance, Baidu and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

American IBM comes in fifth place,followed by China’s Alibaba, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, and Microsoft occupy the last spots in the top 10.

WIPO notes that most patents They are for inventions in the field of image but the sectors related to molecules, proteins and genes are also growing.

According to WIPO Director General Daren Tang, the report gives “an overview of what is happening now, so that we can make slightly more informed assumptions about what will happen in the coming years.”

He also acknowledges that there are dangers,such as massive job losses or intellectual property infringements.

If GenAI “undermines human creativity and prevents a human creator from making a living, that’s something we’ll really have to pay attention to,” said Tang, who hopes modelers and content creators will find common ground.

According to Tang, such a revolutionary technology must keep humans “at the center of the innovation ecosystem.”