China leading the Gen AI patent race, followed by US and South Korea: UN

The UN said that the number of international patent filings for innovations using cutting-edge generative artificial intelligence have surged eightfold in six years, with the majority of innovators reported from China.

The United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said in a fresh report that a total of 54,000 patents were filed for generative AI innovations in the decade leading to 2023.

A full 25 percent of those were filed in the last year alone, WIPO said.

WIPO chief Daren Tang said that GenAI, in which trained computer programmes create everything from text and videos to music and computer code in seconds on simple prompts, “has emerged as a game-changing technology”. GenAI patents still only represent six percent of all AI patents globally, but the number of filings is rising fast.

It was in 2017 when the deep neural network architecture behind large language models that have become synonymous with AI was first introduced and even since then patent filing for Gen AI has seen a manifold increase.

 “This is a booming area,” WIPO’s patent analytics manager Christopher Harrison told reporters in Geneva.

The technology is powering a range of industrial and consumer products, including chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. It can also do things like help design new molecules for drug development and enable new product design and optimisation.

While China came first with more than 38,000 GenAI innovations, the United States was reported to have taken the second place with 6,276. South Korea came in third, at 4,155, followed by Japan at 3,409. India, where 1,350 GenAI patents were filed, meanwhile saw the highest average annual growth rate, at 56 percent, WIPO said.

Most of the top GenAI applicants are Chinese, with Tencent on top, followed by Ping An Insurance, Baidu, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Image and video data dominated the GenAI patent filings, with nearly 18,000 inventions over the decade under review, followed by text, and speech/music with nearly 13,500 inventions each.

WIPO’s report also found that GenAI patents using molecule, gene and protein-based data were growing rapidly, with nearly 1,500 inventions since 2014, and an average 78-percent annual growth over the past five years.