China is the runaway chief in generative AI patent functions adopted by the US, the UN says

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GENEVA (AP) — China has requested much more patents than every other nation relating to generative AI, the U.N. mental property company stated Wednesday, with the USA a distant second.

The expertise, which provides the potential to spice up effectivity and velocity up scientific discoveries but in addition raises issues 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 development and curiosity within the expertise since generative AI vaulted into broad public consciousness in late 2022, WIPO stated.

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The brand new report on patents, the primary of its sort, goals to trace patent functions 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 pc imaginative and prescient.

“WIPO hopes to provide everybody a greater understanding of the place this fast-evolving expertise is being developed, and the place it’s headed,” WIPO Director-Basic Daren Tang instructed reporters.

Over the last decade beginning in 2014, over 38,200 GenAI innovations got here from China. That’s 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, pictures, music, pc code and different content material via using instruments together with ChatGPT from OpenAI, Google Gemini and Ernie from China’s Baidu. The expertise has been employed by many industries together with the life sciences, manufacturing, transportation, safety and telecommunications.

Some critics concern that GenAI may change staff in some varieties of jobs or improperly take human-generated content material with out truthful or enough compensation to the individuals behind it.

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As with different varieties of patent functions, WIPO officers acknowledge that the amount of GenAI patents doesn’t point out high quality. It’s exhausting to inform so early within the expertise which patents may have market worth or be transformative for society.

“Let’s see how the the information and the way the developments unfold over time,” Tang stated.

The U.S. and China are sometimes seen as rivals within the growth of synthetic intelligence, however by some measures U.S. tech firms are taking the lead in making the world’s most cutting-edge AI programs.

Sixty-one notable machine-learning fashions emerged from U.S.-based establishments in 2023, outpacing the European Union’s 21 and China’s 15, in accordance with the annual AI Index from Stanford College’s Institute for Human-centered Synthetic Intelligence. 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 — similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3, Gemini and Meta’s Llama, that are enormous, versatile and educated on huge datasets.

The U.S. additionally has led China in personal AI investments and the variety of newly fashioned 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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Observe AP protection of synthetic intelligence at https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence

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