📊 Top Companies by Generative AI Patents

The release of AI assistants like ChatGPT has created significant public enthusiasm for generative AI (GenAI). This is reflected in the sharp increase in patent activity, with the number of patent families in GenAI growing from just 733 in 2014 to over 14,000 in 2023.

Here’s a look at the top companies by patent ownership in GenAI models as of April 2024, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

China Leads in Generative AI Patents
Among the GenAI programs or models with most patents are:

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): GANs use a generator to create data and a discriminator to evaluate it, refining the generator’s output. They are essential in image generation, style transfer, and data augmentation.
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs): VAEs encode data into a latent space and decode it back, allowing new data generation by sampling the latent space. They are used in image generation, anomaly detection, and semi-supervised learning.
Decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs): LLMs, like GPT, generate text by leveraging the transformer architecture and vast pre-training data. They excel in text completion, translation, summarization, and conversational AI.
Here are the leading companies:

1. Tencent Holdings 🇨🇳: 2,074 patents
2. Ping An Insurance 🇨🇳: 1,564 patents
3. Baidu 🇨🇳: 1,234 patents
4. IBM 🇺🇸: 601 patents
5. Alibaba Group 🇨🇳: 571 patents
6. Samsung Electronics 🇰🇷: 468 patents
7. Alphabet/Google 🇺🇸: 443 patents
8. ByteDance 🇨🇳: 418 patents
9. BBK Electronics 🇨🇳: 377 patents
10. Microsoft 🇺🇸: 377 patents
11. Netease 🇨🇳: 337 patents
12. NTT 🇯🇵: 330 patents
13. Huawei 🇨🇳: 328 patents
14. China Mobile 🇨🇳: 300 patents
15. State Grid 🇨🇳: 291 patents
16. Adobe 🇺🇸: 257 patents
17. Sony Group 🇯🇵: 218 patents
18. Siemens 🇩🇪: 208 patents
19. Ant Group 🇨🇳: 202 patents
20. Industrial and Commercial Bank of China 🇨🇳: 191 patents

Highlights
China's Dominance: Chinese companies like Tencent, Ping An Insurance, and Baidu are at the forefront of the GenAI patent race.
U.S. Leaders: IBM, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft lead the pack among U.S. companies. IBM's Watsonx platform focuses on data security and compliance. Alphabet's AI division recently released its LLM model, Gemini, and Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.
Global Reach: The list includes companies from South Korea, Japan, Germany, and the U.S., showing the worldwide race in AI innovation.
This surge in patents underscores the rapid advancements and intense competition in the field of generative AI.
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