UN: China leads the race for generative AI patents; Tencent and Baidu top the list

China dominates the worldwide race for patents on generative artificial intelligence, filing greater than 38,000 patents from 2014 to 2023, a brand new United Nations report on Thursday.

That is six times greater than the variety of patents filed by inventors based within the United States, based on the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization.

Generative AI is a variety of artificial intelligence that enables users to generate content reminiscent of text, images, music, audio and videos.

Geographically, China leads the world with 38,210 inventions, far surpassing the United States (6,276), the Republic of Korea (4,155), Japan (3,409) and India (1,350).

According to the report, generative AI patents currently account for six% of all AI patents worldwide.

“The sharp increase in patent activity reflects recent technological advances and the potential of GenAI,” the report said.

China has tried to meet up with ChatGPT owner OpenAI and US tech giants Microsoft, alphabet's Google and Amazon in the event of enormous language models (LLM), after joining late.

ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022 for its ability to generate human responses to user input.

Last 12 months, Chinese technology giants, including Alibaba And baidu have launched their very own LLMs to challenge their US counterparts.

To consolidate its presence in the worldwide technology race, China launched a three-year “action plan” in May to strengthen standards in AI chips and generative AI and expand national computing power, with the aim of promoting technological and economic development.

“China has [a] a huge untapped market for consumers and also for companies and industry partners to innovate and adopt generative AI technologies [in] different applications or industries that use different specialized data sets,” Wei Sun, senior artificial intelligence consultant at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC's “Street Signs Asia” on Thursday.

“This is the key to China's success, namely the development of real application implementations that could enable the country to surpass the United States in this area.”

Image and video data dominated artificial intelligence patents with 17,996 inventions, followed by text (13,494) and speech or music (13,480), the UN report said.

By analyzing patent trends and data, the agency aims to help policymakers “shape the development of generic AI for our mutual benefit.”