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21st Century Business Herald reporter Kong Haili and intern Wang Tian report from Beijing

The Generative Artificial Intelligence Patent Landscape Report recently released by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) shows that China's patent applications for generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the decade from 2014 to 2023 reached 38,210, ranking first in the world, six times that of the second-ranked United States. So far, Chinese companies have launched more than 200 large-scale language models to the market.

The report shows that the top five patent inventors are from China (38,210 items), the United States (6,276 items), South Korea (4,155 items), Japan (3,409 items) and India (1,350 items).

Since the advent of the Transformer neural network architecture based on the large language model in 2017, the number of patents related to generative AI has increased rapidly by 7 times. Since the end of 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, generative AI patents have exploded. The number of generative AI patents published in 2023 alone exceeded 25% of the total. However, as of now, generative AI patents still only account for 6% of all AI patents in the world.

The top ten GenAI patent application institutions are Tencent (2,074 inventions), Ping An Insurance (1,564), Baidu (1,234), Chinese Academy of Sciences (607), IBM (601), Alibaba Group (571), Samsung Electronics (468), Alphabet (443), ByteDance (418), and Microsoft (377). Among them, six are Chinese companies.

The report analyzes the labor market challenges that generative AI technology may bring. Unlike previous waves of automation that mainly affected middle-skilled workers, the widespread application of AI technology may replace some high-paying positions such as data analysts, market research analysts or legal assistants.

Image and video data is the most researched area in generative AI patents (17,996), followed by text (13,494) and speech/music (13,480).

The report also points out the controversies related to generative AI, such as copyright issues caused by the use of generative AI. Some artists and writers accuse major AI companies such as OpenAI of using their copyrighted works to train AI systems without permission, and whether AI inventions can be patented.