China is far ahead of other nations in developing generative AI products like chatbots, filing six times as many patents as its nearest competitor, the United States.
According to U.N. data released on Wednesday – The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which is in charge of overseeing a system for countries to share recognition of patents, reports that over 50,000 patent applications have been filed in the past ten years in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which creates text, images, computer code, and even music from pre-existing information.
According to the report, one-quarter of them were filed in 2023 alone.
This is a booming area. This is a rapidly expanding area. And it’s an area where we anticipate to see significantly more growth, WIPO Patent Analytics Manager Christopher Harrison told reporters.
China Generative AI Invention
According to WIPO, China filed more than 38,000 GenAI inventions between 2014 and 2023, whereas the United States filed 6,276 within the same period.
Harrison stated that the Chinese patent filings covered a wide range of industries, from autonomous driving to publishing to document management.
South Korea, Japan, and India were placed third, fourth, and fifth, with India experiencing the highest growth, according to the data.
Among the top applications were China’s ByteDance, which controls the video app TikTok, Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group, and Microsoft, which backed startup OpenAI, which produced ChatGPT.
While chatbots capable of mimicking human language are currently widely employed by retailers and others to improve customer service, WIPO’s Harrison believes GenAI has the potential to alter many other economic sectors such as science, publishing, transportation, and security.
The patent data implies that this is an area that will have a significant impact on many different industrial sectors in the future,” said WIPO’s Harrison, noting the scientific sector, where GenAI-created chemicals have the potential to accelerate medical research.
WIPO stated that it anticipates a new wave of patents to be filed soon and intends to offer a future update of the data, maybe utilizing GenAI to highlight the pattern.
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