Director General the World Intellectual Property Organization Daren Tang speaks during a press conference at the headquarters of the World Intellectual Property Organization , in Geneva, on Nov. 17, 2023.China has requested far more patents than any other country when it comes to generative AI, the U.N. intellectual property agency said Wednesday, with the United States a distant second.
The new report on patents, the first of its kind, aims to track patent applications as a possible indication of trends in artificial intelligence. It focuses only on generative AI and excludes artificial intelligence more broadly, which includes technologies like facial recognition or autonomous driving.
GenAI helps users create text, images, music, computer code and other content through the use of tools including ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google Gemini and Ernie from China’s Baidu. The technology has been employed by many industries including the life sciences, manufacturing, transportation, security and telecommunications.
“Looking at patents just paints one part of a narrative,” said Nestor Maslej, a research manager at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, who added that patent approval rates can vary depending on a country’s laws.