China is far ahead of other countries in generative artificial intelligence (AI) inventions such as chatbots, filing six times more patents than its closest rival, the US, UN data showed yesterday.
Generative AI, which produces text, images, computer code and even music from existing information, is exploding, with more than 50,000 patent applications filed in the past decade, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees a system for countries to share recognition of patents.
One-quarter of them were filed last year alone, it said.
Photo: Reuters
“This is a booming area this is an area that is growing at increasing speed and it’s somewhere that we expect to grow even more,” WIPO patent analytics manager Christopher Harrison told reporters.
More than 38,000 generative AI inventions were filed by China between 2014 and last year, versus 6,276 filed by the US over the same period, WIPO said.
The Chinese patent applications covered a broad area of sectors from autonomous driving to publishing to document management, Harrison said.
South Korea, Japan and India were ranked third, fourth and fifth respectively, with India growing at the fastest rate, the data showed.
Among the top applicants were China’s ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), which owns video app TikTok, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) and Microsoft Corp, a backer of start-up OpenAI which created ChatGPT.
While retailers and others are widely using chatbots with the ability to mimic human discourse to improve customer service, generative AI has the potential to transform many other economic sectors such as science, publishing, transportation or security, Harrison said.
“The patent data suggests this is an area that is going to have a profound impact across many different industrial sectors going forward,” he said, highlighting the scientific sector, in which generative AI-created molecules have the potential to expedite drug development.
WIPO said it expects a further wave of patents to be filed soon and plans to release an update of the data, possibly using generative AI to illustrate the trend.
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