In the past, when relevant organizations released AI patent rankings, if they indicated that "China has already surpassed the United States in the number of AI patent applications, and that China has already taken the lead in the international arena in terms of AI technological strength", such rankings would attract comments of "water", "blind confidence", and "playing with oneself" from netizens who lacked confidence in China's technological development. This kind of list will attract comments from netizens who are not confident in China's technological development, such as "watered down", "blind confidence", and "making fun of themselves".
Recently, according to Nikkei.com, Chinese companies have performed well on the "Nikkei Top 50 Artificial Intelligence Patents" list for the past three years, and are now ahead of the U.S. in terms of the total number of patents filed. Nikkei's patent ranking was based on publicly available data from the U.S., China, Europe and Japan, as well as the World Intellectual Property Organization, with help from market research firm Patent Result.
The report shows that, comparing the number of global AI patent applications, IBM leads with 3,000 AI patents, while Microsoft and Google rank second and third with 1,995 and 1,659 AI patents respectively.
Among the Chinese companies, Baidu is in the first place, with 1,522 patents filed, rising from 11th to 4th place. State Grid ranked 6th with 1,173 patents. Tencent also moved up to No. 8 from No. 20, with a total of 766 patents.
Overall, some of the Chinese tech giants on the list were expected, but the list presented other information that put it on Weibo's hot search after its release, sparking heated debate among netizens. Specifically, there are three major questions:
Question 1: Xiaomi bucks Huawei in the number of AI patent applications?
In the ranking, Xiaomi is only three AI patent applications narrowly ahead of Huawei, ranked 11th, while the former was ranked 85th last year, which can be said to be a rapid progress.
Cui Baoqiu, vice president of Xiaomi Group and chairman of Xiaomi's technical committee, posted the news on Weibo, and then Lei Jun similarly retweeted the microblog.
According to the China Artificial Intelligence Development Report 2018 released by Tsinghua University last year, Xiaomi is also ahead of Huawei with 333 patents to Huawei's 211. Both the Chinese and foreign lists show that Xiaomi is ahead of Huawei in the number of AI patents, breaking the stereotype that Xiaomi is far from Huawei and other companies in AI research and development.
Even so, this list to prove that millet than Huawei in AI technology strength is not enough (of course, Huawei may not recognize this ranking), the current results can only be sure that millet as a "dark horse" really in the AI technology research and development efforts, and the lack of investment in research and development is the place where it has been criticized.
In fact, compared to the number of global patents, millet in front of Huawei is a small witch. In an interview with CCTV this year, Ren Zhengfei said that Huawei has a total of 87,805 patents in the world, of which 11,152 are authorized in the United States. And in March 2018, Lei Jun mentioned in an interview with Bloomberg that Xiaomi's patents were only 6,324 patents. As Cui Baoqiu said, comrades still need to work hard.
To lead the technology trend in the field of AI, like other technology giants, millet has already made preparations. It is understood that millet has invested up to 4 billion yuan in research and development in the first three quarters of 2018, and has invested a team of more than 1,500 people in the field of AI; and in the annual meeting at the beginning of this year, Lei Jun formally announced that millet had launched a "cell phone + AIoT" double engine strategy. He said that this will be the core strategy of millet in the next five years, and will continue to invest more than 10 billion yuan in the field of AIoT.
In short, the number of AI patents is obviously not the only standard to measure the technical strength of an enterprise, and whether an enterprise can grow bigger and stronger in the AI era does not only rely on the number of patents, but one thing is certain, that is, continuous investment, the number of patents, a "quantitative change" will lead to qualitative changes.
Question 2: Is National Grid the Big Boss in AI?
What's surprising is that tech giants like Huawei, ZTE, Haikang, and Dahua, as well as AI unicorns like Shangtang and Kuangshi, are not in the top ten. On the contrary, in the list of the top 15 AI patents, the State Grid was ranked 6th, and with 1,173 patents applied for, far more than Tencent and Ali, this name is a crane like a chicken in which it appears to be particularly bright, so that many people can not figure out.
In fact, last year, the China Patent Protection Association released a report on the in-depth analysis of artificial intelligence technology patents, which showed that the State Grid's patent applications among domestic enterprises were also second only to those of Baidu and Tencent. At that time, some people questioned that the criteria for judging the list might be too broad and "unscientific", and whether State Grid's strength in the field of AI had been publicized too lowly in the public eye.
The China Artificial Intelligence Development Report 2018 points out that there are three main reasons why State Grid's AI patents have grown rapidly in recent years:
For one thing, the operation and management of the power grid involves the collection and analysis of different types of data, which provides an excellent scenario for AI technologies such as image processing, speech recognition and big data analysis;
Secondly, the State Grid, in addition to having huge asset full life cycle data and rich user data, also has grid wide area multi-time scale operation data and has completed digitalization and informatization transformation, which creates very good conditions for further intelligence of grid operation and management;
Thirdly, State Grid has a clear project management system, and projects in the direction of artificial intelligence have strict quantitative project results assessment indicators.
AI technology camp in the search for the State Grid related AI project input, did not find relevant information, I do not know whether this is related to its state-owned enterprises nature of confidentiality measures. But this also creates doubts about the State Grid's strength in AI patents. However, as a traditional state-owned enterprise, the number of patents applied for in the field of artificial intelligence is so large, whether it is placed on the national level or on the enterprise itself, at least it also highlights the urgency of its AI technology landing to take the lead.
Question 3: Does the fact that China has filed more AI patents than the US mean that AI is stronger than the US?
With the emphasis on China's scientific and technological development in recent years, especially the frequent introduction of relevant AI strategic policies at the national level, China's development in the field of AI technology to maintain the world's leading position, and even in the international competition, the AI technology competition are focused on the two countries between China and the United States.
China and the U.S. have filed a large number of AI technology patents, which also reflects the game between countries and enterprises. between 2013 and 2015, the U.S. was in the lead in the number of patent applications, but in the past three years, the number of Chinese companies in the top 50 AI-related patent applications has doubled, with a total of 19, exceeding the U.S.'s 12. The top 15 of the most notable rankings include six Chinese companies, five from the U.S., three from Japan, and one from South Korea. Of the top 15 in the most popular rankings, six are from China, five are from the US, three are from Japan and one is from South Korea.
China's growth in AI patents has come mainly in the areas of e-commerce, data search and language processing. Image processing patents have been particularly strong, at 16,000, four times the number in the U.S. This is, of course, a reflection of China's strength in face recognition technology.
It is indeed encouraging to see that China is ahead of the US in terms of the number of patent applications alone, but we should also see gaps in terms of the innovation of basic technologies, AI infrastructure, the percentage of outstanding talents, and research mechanisms. For example, the most direct is in the basic framework, the world's highest utilization rate is Google's TensorFlow and Facebook's Pytorch in order, while the machine learning framework utilization rate of Chinese enterprises can not be compared with it.
All in all, our research in AI technology has shown "quantity", but it is important to improve the "quality" of AI technology, so that China can better lead the wave of AI technology, and if we seize new technologies such as 5G in the future, we will be more confident in the development of technology. If we seize new technologies such as 5G in the future, we will be more confident in our technological development.
