WIPO & Generative Artificial Intelligence

Today, my newsfeed was filled with articles about WIPO’s report on Generative AI with details of China being a dominant force, having filed more than 38000 GenAI Patents between 2014-2023. This much information piqued my curiosity and I ended up searching for the report, which is a whopping 114 pages. This report provides ?insights on patenting activity and scientific publications in the field of GenAI and builds on the 2019 WIPO Technology Trends publication on artificial intelligence. It aims to shed light on the current technology development, its changing dynamics and the applications in which GenAI technologies are expected to be used. It also identifies key research countries, companies and organizations.

Some of the key observations in the report are as follows:

• Over the past 10 years, the number of patent families in GenAI has grown from just only 733 in 2014 to more than 14,000 in 2023. The number of scientific publications has increased even more over the same period, from just 116 in 2014 to more than 34,000 in 2023
• Tencent, Ping An Insurance Group and Baidu own the most GenAI patents
• ?After China, US holds the second place in GenAI patenting. The Asian countries Republic of Korea, Japan and India are other key research locations for GenAI, all ranking in the top 5 countries worldwide.
• ?Gen AI models include generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs) and decoder-based large language models (LLMs) with GAN patents show the strongest increase over the past decade.

When comparing the development of GenAI patent family publications with all AI patent family publications since 2014, it is clear that GenAI is still only a relatively small part of all AI research activity. In 2023, there were 14,080 GenAI patent family publications compared to almost 230,000 AI patent family publications in total. However, the share of GenAI patent is on constant rise.

One of the shocking parts of this report was discussion on Open AI holding patents and as it turns out, Open AI does not hold any patent for its research activities till 2023, which may be explained basis its non-profit nature, which I don’t agree with. I would rather agree that the patents were filed in the name of a parent or other entity or might not have been filed to be retained as trade secrets. The strategy changed after 2023 wherein Open AI filed six patents. At present, basis a quick assignee search on a paid database, the total stands at 9 patents.

Concerns have also been raised about potential copyright infringement of GenAI art, text and code, as well as training data. AI models may generate text, images and audio that closely resemble existing works, potentially infringing copyright. As a result, copyright issues are already fueling debate in a number of jurisdictions.

The report also talks about responsible AI for making appropriate and ethical decisions related to AI. While we are only seeing beginning of patent filing wave, soon we will also be seeing strategic collaborations, licensing and possible litigations around it.

Link: https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/patent-landscape-report-generative-artificial-intelligence-genai/index.html

?Image from co-pilot.