There has been an increase in patent filings by Chinese
enterprises for artificial intelligence products rapidly in the past couple years.
The companies that hold the most active Artificial Intelligence and machine
learning patent families are now tech giant Tencent and search engine provider
Baidu. Their progress is ahead of U.S. firm IBM, South Korea’s Samsung, Chinese
insurance provider Ping An and former AI patent leader Microsoft. The latter
company has been seeing one of its major AI investments come to fruition
recently, as conversational AI bot ChatGPT by Microsoft partner OpenAI has been
making waves. Microsoft suddenly announced another round of funding for OpenAI,
believed to be to the tune of $10 billion.
This infographic that is based on the LexisNexis PatentSight directory shows, Tencent and Baidu became the largest patent owners in machine learning and AI in 2021, each holding more than 9,000 active patent families. A family is denoted as a set of patents that cover the same technical content. IBM owned more than 7,000 families that same year, while Microsoft held just under 6,000 families coming on rank six. According to LexisNexis, it was Microsoft which owned the most AI patents between 2012 and 2019.
Even bigger than the rise in filings by Tencent and Baidu
was the AI patent frenzy released by Chinese insurance and banking giant Ping
An. The number of patent families Ping An owns increased from fewer than 50 to
more than 6,000 just in the past five years. Among the tools recently developed
for Artificial Intelligence by the company is a software that analyzes facial
micro-expressions (i.e. eye blinks, involuntary twitches). Ping An uses these expressions
as data to evaluate insurance claims its policyholders send in the form of
videos.
Infographic by: statista
