GENEVA — China has applied for far more patents than any other country when it comes to generative AI, the UN intellectual property agency said on Wednesday, with the United States a distant second.
The technology, which offers the potential to increase efficiency and accelerate scientific discoveries but also raises concerns about jobs and workers, was linked to around 54,000 inventions in the decade to 2023, the World Intellectual Property Organization reported.
More than a quarter of those inventions emerged last year, a testament to the explosive growth and interest in the technology since generative AI burst into public consciousness in late 2022, WIPO said.
The new patent report, the first of its kind, aims to track patent applications as a possible indicator of trends in artificial intelligence. It focuses solely on generative AI and excludes artificial intelligence more broadly, which includes technologies such as facial recognition or computer vision.
“WIPO hopes that everyone will better understand where this rapidly evolving technology is developing and where it is going,” WIPO Director General Daren Tang told reporters.
During the decade starting in 2014, more than 38,200 GenAI inventions came from China. That’s six times more than in the United States, which had almost 6,300. They were followed by South Korea with 4,155, Japan with more than 3,400 and India with 1,350.
GenAI helps users create text, images, music, computer code, and other content by using tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and China’s Baidu’s Ernie. The technology has been employed by many industries, including life sciences, manufacturing, transportation, security and telecommunications.
Some critics fear that GenAI could replace workers in some types of jobs or improperly take human-generated content without fair or adequate compensation for the people behind it.
As with other types of patent applications, WIPO officials recognize that the quantity of GenAI patents does not indicate quality. It is difficult to say at such an early stage of the technology which patents will have market value or be transformative for society.
“Let’s see how the data develops and evolves over time,” Tang said.
The United States and China are often seen as rivals in the development of artificial intelligence, but by some measures, American technology companies are taking the lead in manufacturing the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems.
Sixty-one notable machine learning models emerged from US-based institutions in 2023, surpassing 21 from the European Union and 15 from China, according to the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s annual AI Index. Stanford University. Of the EU countries, France had the most, with eight.
By another measure, the United States also has so-called core AI models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3, Gemini, and Meta’s Llama, which are huge, versatile, and trained on massive data sets.
The United States has also led China in private investments in AI and in the number of AI startups created, while China has led in industrial robotics.
___
Matt O’Brien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
___
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
