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China’s first immersive AI experience project, “AI Dream,” opened to the public at Shanghai Tower on April 12.
The number of international patent applications for innovations using cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence has increased eightfold in six years, the United Nations said on Wednesday, with the majority coming from China-based innovators.
A total of 54,000 patents were filed for generative AI innovations in the decade to 2023, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization said in a new report.
According to WIPO, 25% of these were filed in the last year alone.
So-called GenAI technology, in which trained computer programs create everything from text and video to music and computer code in seconds from simple prompts, “has become a revolutionary technology,” said WIPO Director Daren Tang.
GenAI patents still only account for six percent of all AI patents worldwide, but the number of filings is growing rapidly.
WIPO noted that GenAI patents have increased eightfold since 2017, when the deep neural network architecture behind the large language models that have become synonymous with AI was first introduced.
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Children watch a robot performance at the Qinhuangdao Glass Museum in Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, on May 25.
Booming
“It’s a growing area,” Christopher Harrison, head of patent analysis at WIPO, told reporters in Geneva.
This technology powers a range of 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.
The WIPO report determined that by far the majority of GenAI patents were filed in China.
Between 2014 and 2023, more than 38,000 GenAI innovations came from this country, according to the report.
That’s six times more than the United States, in second place with 6,276. South Korea comes in third with 4,155, followed by Japan with 3,409.
India, where 1,350 GenAI patents were filed, saw the highest average annual growth rate of 56%, according to WIPO.
Most of the top GenAI candidates are Chinese, with Tencent leading the way, followed by Ping An Insurance, Baidu and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
IBM only appears in fifth place, followed by China’s Alibaba, South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and Google’s parent company Alphabet, with China’s ByteDance and Microsoft occupying the final spots in the top 10, according to the WIPO report.
Image and video data dominated GenAI’s patent filings, with nearly 18,000 inventions over the decade under review, followed by text and speech/music with nearly 13,500 inventions each.
The WIPO report also found that GenAI patents using data based on molecules, genes and proteins are growing rapidly, with nearly 1,500 inventions since 2014 and an average annual growth of 78% over the past five years.
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A Yulong AI processor chip was displayed at the booth of Zhuhai Aerospace Microchips Science and Technology at the 10th China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair on June 12.
Revolutionary
Tang told reporters that the WIPO report was intended to provide “a snapshot of what’s happening upstream, so that we can make somewhat more informed guesses about what’s going to happen downstream in the years to come.”
He acknowledged the fears surrounding the technology, including the risk of massive job losses, industrial disruption and breaches of intellectual property protections.
If GenAI “undermines human creativity and…prevents a human creator from making a living, I think that’s something we really need to be careful about,” he said.
He particularly stressed the importance of intellectual property protections to protect creative expression, insisting that they cannot be flouted by those who train AI models.
He expressed hope that “there will be some form of agreement or arrangement between the companies that train the models and the companies or creators that create the content.”
Such revolutionary technology, he insisted, must keep humans “at the center of the innovation ecosystem…enhancing and enabling human-based innovation, not destroying it.”
