The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced that China-based organizations filed the most patents related to generative AI over the past decade, outpacing the U.S., Republic of Korea, Japan, and India combined—the four other top generative AI patent-holding nations. China filed 38,210 generative AI patents from 2014 to 2023, while the U.S. is a far second with 6,276 patents.
Other countries in the top 7 of generative AI patent applications include the Republic of Korea (South Korea) at 4,155, Japan at 3,409, India at 1,350, the U.K. at 714, and Germany at 708. This data shows how China is pushing hard to become one of the world's technological leaders. Although it still lags behind the Western world in chipmaking capabilities, this may not be true for long in the software aspect of computing.
However, Washington is going to great lengths to hamper China's tech dominance dreams, with multiple sanctions levied against it. For example, the White House wants to restrict the export of GAA tech and HBM chips to the country—crucial technology required for the local development of AI accelerators. OpenAI has also stepped away from the East Asian country, including its territories like Hong Kong, pushing Chinese firms like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to step into the generative AI void.
Nevertheless, universities and research institutions are the primary drivers of generative AI development. According to the WIPO report, out of the top 20 patent holders on its list, 19 are from educational organizations, with Alphabet (Google) being the only corporation standing out. But even though it just sits at number four with the number of published research papers, the sole private corporation in the top patent holders seems to have had a great impact.
Alphabet ranks first in terms of citations, with its research receiving 47,568 mentions from 2010 to 2023. The University of California, Berkeley, is second with 26,090 citations, followed by Université de Montréal and Stanford. Meta is fifth with 19,418 citations. Of the top 20 organizations with citations, only one Chinese organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is on the list, with 15,674 mentions.
As the U.S. is applying more and more sanctions against China in the U.S.-China chip war, Chinese scientists are forced to make innovations to help push forward development. While this may be far more difficult with hardware, software engineers and researchers would likely have more options when it comes to programming.
