Ever since the release of AI models like ChatGPT, the general public has gotten comfortable using generative AI in their day to day lives. Because of the need for more GenAI tools, the need for patents have also grown. The number of patent families has grown from just 733 in 2014 to 14,000 in 2023. Data by the World Intellectual Property Organization shows top companies which have the most patent ownership in generative AI models.
China is dominating the GenAI market with the most patents. Some of the most prominent companies in China which own GenAI patents are Tencent Holdings with 20,74 patents, Ping An Insurance with 1,564 patents and Baidu with around 1,230 patents. Tencent is going to add generative AI capabilities in its products like WeChat while Baidu has recently released its AI chatbots called ERNIE 4.0.
The US companies with the most patent ownerships are IBM (601), Alphabet/Google (443), Microsoft (377) and Adobe (257). IBM has developed its own GenAI platform called watsonx, Alphabet has released its LLM model called Gemini while Microsoft is a big investor of OpenAI. Samsung Electronics from South Korea owns 468 patents, while Japan’s NTT and Sony Group have ownership of 330 and 218 patents respectively. The only European company which has the most GenAI patents is Siemens from Germany with 208 patents.
There are different types of GenAI models and programs that use the most GenAI patents. Among them is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which use a generator to create data and are important for image generation. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) encode data and decode it back, which allows new data generation. Decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text through pre-training data like ChatGPT.
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China is dominating the GenAI market with the most patents. Some of the most prominent companies in China which own GenAI patents are Tencent Holdings with 20,74 patents, Ping An Insurance with 1,564 patents and Baidu with around 1,230 patents. Tencent is going to add generative AI capabilities in its products like WeChat while Baidu has recently released its AI chatbots called ERNIE 4.0.
The US companies with the most patent ownerships are IBM (601), Alphabet/Google (443), Microsoft (377) and Adobe (257). IBM has developed its own GenAI platform called watsonx, Alphabet has released its LLM model called Gemini while Microsoft is a big investor of OpenAI. Samsung Electronics from South Korea owns 468 patents, while Japan’s NTT and Sony Group have ownership of 330 and 218 patents respectively. The only European company which has the most GenAI patents is Siemens from Germany with 208 patents.
There are different types of GenAI models and programs that use the most GenAI patents. Among them is Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which use a generator to create data and are important for image generation. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) encode data and decode it back, which allows new data generation. Decoder-based Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text through pre-training data like ChatGPT.
| Company | Country | GenAI Total Patents |
|---|---|---|
| Tencent Holdings | China | 2,074 |
| Ping An Insurance | China | 1,564 |
| Baidu | China | 1,234 |
| IBM | US | 601 |
| Alibaba Group | China | 571 |
| Samsung Electronics | Republic of Korea | 468 |
| Alphabet/Google | US | 443 |
| ByteDance | China | 418 |
| BBK Electronics | China | 377 |
| Microsoft | US | 377 |
| Netease | China | 337 |
| NTT | Japan | 330 |
| Huawei | China | 328 |
| China Mobile | China | 300 |
| State Grid | China | 291 |
| Adobe | US | 257 |
| Sony Group | Japan | 218 |
| Siemens | Germany | 208 |
| Ant Group | China | 202 |
| Industrial and Commercial Bank of China | China | 191 |
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