Between 2014-2023, China has filed more patent applications (38,000) covering Generative AI (GenAI) technology than another other country, six times more than second place United States, as reported by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Generative Artificial Intelligence Patent Landscape Report (Report). GenAI creates content including text, images, music, or software code, powering a range of industrial and consumer products, including chatbots such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Baidu’s ERNIE.
WIPO’s Report analyzed technical publications as well as patenting activities and builds on the 2019 WIPO Technology Trends publication on artificial intelligence. Key findings of the Report include:
A Sharp Increase in Patenting Activity
The Report credits technological advances in GenAI for the increase in patenting activity. The Report notes that ‘[o]ver the past 10 years, the number of patent families in GenAI has grown from just only 733 in 2014 to more than 14,000 in 2023. Since the introduction of the transformer in 2017, the deep neural network architecture behind the Large Language Models that have become synonymous with GenAI, the number of GenAI patents has increased by over 800%. The number of scientific publications has increased even more over the same time period, from just 116 in 2014 to more than 34,000 in 2023. Over 25% of all GenAI patents and over 45% of all GenAI scientific papers were published in 2023 alone. Report on page 7.
Chinese Companies Lead Patent Filings
Tencent (first), Ping An Insurance Group (second) and Baidu (third) file the most GenAI patents. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (fourth) is the sole research organization in the top 10 ranking. Alibaba (sixth) and Bytedance (ninth) are other Chinese companies in the top 10. The top U.S. companies include IBM (fifth), Alphabet/Google (eighth) and Microsoft (tenth). Microsoft also ranks as another key player in GenAI and an investor in OpenAI. OpenAI itself has only recently filed its first GenAI patents. Rounding out the top 10 is electronics conglomerate Samsung Electronics (seventh) from the Republic of Korea.
Landscape Analysis of GenAI Publications
The Chinese Academy of Sciences publishes more than any other group with more than 1,100 publications since 2010. Tsinghua University and Stanford University follow in second and third place with more than 600 publications each. Alphabet/Google (fourth) is the only company in the top 20 (556 scientific publications).
However, publication activity does not equate with the impact of the number of scientific publications. Alphabet/Google is the leading institution by a wide margin, and seven other companies are present in the top 20. OpenAI only published 48 articles (325th institution in terms of number of publications), but these publications received a total of 11,816 citations from other scientific publications (13th overall).
Global Patent Ranking By The Numbers
China is the global leader in GenAI patent filings with the United States a distant second. The Republic of Korea (third), Japan (fourth), India (fifth), the UK (sixth), and Germany (seventh) follow.
Top GenAI Application Areas
The top application areas for GenAI patents include software, life sciences, business solutions, document management and publishing, business solutions, industry and manufacturing, transportation, security, and telecommunications.
Focus on Personalized Medicine And Life Sciences
The incorporation of GenAI may prove to be transformative for personalized medicine and the life sciences sector in general. GenAI is being applied to expedite drug development, the regulatory approval process, to screen and designing new molecules and the application of known drugs in new applications.
Another promising area is personalized medicine. The ability to generate insights and patterns from vast quantities of patient data will spark more personalized treatments. GenAI can also be used to create models of individual patients’ genomes to predict their response to drugs. As a result, The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) has estimated that the technology could generate US$60 billion to US$110 billion a year in economic value for the pharma and medical-product industries …
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