Over the past 10 years, the number of registered patents in the field of generative AI has surged from 733 in 2014 to over 14,000 in 2023. Since 2017, patent activity has shown strong growth, with an average annual increase of around 45%.
China dominates the patent race, with Tencent and Baidu leading the rankings. Baidu recently unveiled its latest AI chatbot, ERNIE 4.0, based on a large language model (LLM). Tencent plans to integrate generative AI capabilities into products like WeChat. Among U.S. companies, IBM, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft hold leading positions.