Is China the AI leader? Not yet
Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally changing our way of living and it is forming an exciting future for human beings. China is widely believed that it is already or at least will be the leader soon in this new technology revolution, and the Chinese government is not shy in promoting AI developments in China.
Some hints can be found from the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2020 Summit held in Shanghai in July, which showed many aspects of the AI force in China.
However, is it true that China is the world leader? In this article, we look at this question from the patent perspective. Using the patent database/analysing tool Orbit, we have searched with the key words “neural networks OR deep learning” in the title, abstract or claims of live patent families to make sure that they are closely related to AI technologies.
A comparison of AI patent families in China, the US, Europe (European Patents), Korea and Japan (ie, the ‘big five’) is presented and discussed in this article.
Note that the data presented in this article is merely an indication of the overall situation in AI patent industry. The minor flaws of the database were ignored. The Orbit data was collected up to August 26, 2020.
AI patents in China
In total, 17,880 AI-related published patents/applications have been found from Chinese applicants/assignees, of which 13.5% have been granted and the rest are still pending.
The high pending ratio indicates that most of the applications have been filed only recently (note that the average pendency period at CNIPA in 2018 is 22.5 months). The general growing trend in China is shown in Figure 1, where only since 2016 has the filing number started to significantly increase.
If we focus on the year 2018 (due to the 18-month publication delay 2019 and 2020 are not considered), China has almost 42 times more AI patents than in 2015. Additionally, published patent families, which have been first filed in 2019, already reached 9,039.
Including the unpublished applications also filed in 2019, the total filing for last year will be extremely high. These numbers show tremendous interest in AI from Chinese industry and academia.
Figure 1: Number of live patent families from Chinese applicants between 2010 and 2020
