Chinese AI researchers filed the highest number of patents and scientific publications on generative AI in the last 10 years. Out of the 54,000 generative AI patents filed globally between 2014 and 2023, China accounted for 38,210 patents, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s “Patent Landscape Report- Gen AI,” published July 3.
The US, which has some of the biggest tech and AI firms in the world, contributed only 6,276 patent families.
While India's share of global generative AI patents remains low at 3%, the country is quickly emerging as a research hub. India accounted for 1,350 patents with the highest growth rate (56%) compared to both China and the US.
Chinese companies Tencent, Ping An Insurance, and Baidu were the top filers for generative AI patents. Baidu, a pioneer in GenAI, released its Ernie 4.0 model last October and offers several industry-specific large language models (LLMs) for IT, transportation, and energy. Tencent has also released its own AI chatbot, based on its Hunyan LLM, which offers capabilities such as image generation, copywriting, and text recognition.
Research institutes and technical colleges in China also lead the race in generative AI patents.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences was the fourth highest patent filer, which puts it ahead of even the likes of IBM, Samsung and Google parent Alphabet. The Chinese institute has published more than 600 patent families since 2014. A patent family is a collection of related patent applications for the same invention filed in different countries.
Nine out of the top 20 research organizations with the highest patents are based in China.
The Chinese government has played a key role in China’s rise in gen AI and AI in general by prioritizing research and development backed by significant funding. Also, there is more emphasis in China on filing a high number of patents to secure IP rights.
Among US based tech companies, IBM (5th), Alphabet (8th), Microsoft (10th) and Adobe (19th) had the highest number of patents.
According to the report, out of the 75,000 scientific publications on gen AI in the last decade, China leads the race with 12,453, followed by the US with 12,036. India contributed 1,522 publications. While Alphabet was ranked fourth in terms of number of scientific publications, it played a big role in advancing the technology as its publications were most cited.
Further, the report shows that OpenAI, which has become the face of generative AI on the back of ChatGPT’s success, filed zero patents until early 2023. This can be attributed to OpenAI’s beginnings as a non-profit organization which encouraged researchers to publish and share their work with peers to benefit everyone.
However, there has been a shift in OpenAI’s IP strategy since it released ChatGPT and started offering it as a commercial service to individuals as well as enterprises. The firm has published six US patents as of Q1 2024 out of which three have been granted.
OpenAI's pursuit of commercial ventures also led to a lawsuit by former co-founder Elon Musk. He alleged the company had deviated from its original mission. Musk dropped the lawsuit in June after OpenAI published his emails.
The report also shows that the highest number of patents in gen AI were in the category of generative adversarial networks (GAN), followed by Variational Autoencoders (VAE), LLMs, Diffusion models, and Autoregressive models. GANs are widely used in the creation of AI deep fakes.
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