GENEVA — China has requested much more patents than every other nation with regards to generative AI, the U.N. mental property company mentioned Wednesday, with the USA a distant second.
The know-how, which provides the potential to spice up effectivity and pace up scientific discoveries but in addition raises considerations about jobs and staff, was linked to about 54,000 innovations within the decade via 2023, the World Mental Property Group reported.
Greater than 1 / 4 of these innovations emerged final 12 months — a testomony to the explosive progress and curiosity within the know-how since generative AI vaulted into broad public consciousness in late 2022, WIPO mentioned.
The brand new report on patents, the primary of its form, goals to trace patent purposes as a potential indication of traits in synthetic intelligence. It focuses solely on generative AI and excludes synthetic intelligence extra broadly, which incorporates applied sciences like facial recognition or autonomous driving.
“WIPO hopes to present everybody a greater understanding of the place this fast-evolving know-how is being developed, and the place it’s headed,” WIPO Director-Normal Daren Tang advised reporters.
Over the last decade beginning in 2014, over 38,200 generative AI innovations got here from China. That is six occasions greater than from the USA, which had almost 6,300. They have been trailed by South Korea with 4,155, Japan with greater than 3,400 and India with 1,350.
GenAI helps customers create textual content, photos, music, pc code and different content material via using instruments together with ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google Gemini and Ernie from China’s Baidu. The know-how has been employed by many industries together with the life sciences, manufacturing, transportation, safety and telecommunications.
Some critics worry that GenAI may change staff in some kinds of jobs or improperly take human-generated content material with out honest or enough compensation to the folks behind it.
As with different kinds of patent purposes, WIPO officers acknowledge that the amount of GenAI patents would not point out high quality. It is arduous to inform so early within the know-how which patents could have market worth or be transformative for society.
“Let’s see how the information and the way the developments unfold over time,” Tang mentioned.
The U.S. and China are sometimes seen as rivals within the improvement of synthetic intelligence, however by some measures U.S. tech firms are taking the lead in making the world’s most cutting-edge AI techniques.
“ patents simply paints one a part of a story,” mentioned Nestor Maslej, a analysis supervisor at Stanford College’s Institute for Human-Centered Synthetic Intelligence, who added that patent approval charges can fluctuate relying on a rustic’s legal guidelines.
“While you have a look at AI vibrancy, an important query is who’s releasing the very best fashions, the place are these fashions coming from and, no less than by that metric, it looks as if the USA is basically far forward,” mentioned Maslej, who edits Stanford’s annual AI Index measuring the state of the know-how.
Sixty-one notable machine-learning fashions emerged from U.S.-based establishments in 2023, outpacing the European Union’s 21 and China’s 15, based on this 12 months’s AI Index. Of EU international locations, France had probably the most, with eight.
By one other measure, the U.S. additionally has probably the most so-called AI basis fashions — comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3, Gemini and Meta’s Llama, that are big, versatile and skilled on large datasets.
The U.S. additionally has led China in non-public AI investments and the variety of newly shaped AI startups, whereas China has led in industrial robotics.
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Matt O’Brien in Windfall, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.
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Comply with AP protection of synthetic intelligence at https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence
