AI patents show country's innovation potential

For anyone who uses modern appliances or electronic devices, be it a smartphone, a tablet or even a simple table lamp, the latest data from China National Intellectual Property Administration — saying the number of effective domestic artificial intelligence inventive patents had reached 378,000 by the end of 2023 — is undoubtedly good news, because it means the possibility of even smarter appliances and devices arriving soon.

The penetration of AI in modern daily life is deeper than many people may realize. While it's known to all that electric vehicles with cruise control systems have AI chips inside to recognize the road and control the steering wheel, many might not know that even doors that recognize the user's face or voice have an AI-supportive chip inside to "remember" the biometric data in storage and compare it with that of the potential user, while many email service providers that send junk emails to spam folders have an AI program in their server to sniff them out. And these applications are what a majority of the emerging AI inventive patents are all about.

With a 1.4 billion-people market and one-third of its 1.4 million new engineers every year working in AI-related jobs, it's natural that China's AI inventive patents grow by 40 percent year-on-year, 1.4 times the speed of the global average.