US technology giants Alphabet and Microsoft produce more highly cited research on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) than any other company-but Chinese companies Baidu and Tencent are ahead with patents.

This is from the ready, the private sector Ai-Related Activity Tracker, a tool from Emerging Technology Observatory (ETO). The tool collects data on AI trends and has been updated considerably.

The update of parat contains data on the number of AI jobs in companies as well as for publication and patent performance. AI research and its products-especially generative models that create texts and pictures-have developed into a lucrative business. Governments are working on how to regulate the technology because it disturbs industries and raises security issues.

In an area in which the latest research takes place both in industry and at universities, it is important to monitor the commercial activities, says Ngor Luong, who pursues the investments in AI and the company activities at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, a Think tank with a focus on AI at Georgetown University in Washington DC. In their opinion, companies are leaders in the innovation in the AI.

international competence

The data show that large Chinese companies in the field of AI are very competitive, even if you take into account the quality of the work produced, says Zachary Arnold, senior analyst of the observatory. Three Chinese technology giants-Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei-are among the top ten when companies are sorted according to the number of highly cited AI articles and props. "Here in DC and probably elsewhere there is still a bias that China is great and can produce a lot, but it is not really part of the top class," says Arnold. However, the ETO calculates several quality -adapted metrics and Chinese companies in this area to achieve "impressive numbers", says Arnold.

AI giants: Three beam diagrams show the ten companies with the highly cited AI articles, AI publications and AI patents.

The most frequently cited paper in all AI research, according to parat data, is a paper from 2017 entitled 'Attention is all you need'. The paper of American researchers from the Alphabet subsidiary Google is famous for the description of the 'Transformer' architecture, which is now based on many generative AI models. A highly cited example with authors from China is a paper entitled 'Icnet for real-time semantic segmentation on high-resolution images', written by researchers at Tencent, which describes an improved method for identifying objects in images.

US companies only make up three of the ten companies that have registered most AI patents in the past ten years-the others are in China, Germany and South Korea. The Chinese government has long created incentives for patents, but in recent years there has been a movement against arbitrary registration, adds Luong.

top employer

The data also emphasizes the diversity of the sector, says Arnold. There is a long line of companies far beyond the 'big five' companies - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft. And when they are sorted by high-quoted AI research, famous names such as Openai and Apple appear next to companies that are less known for their AI innovations, such as the Japanese mixed group Mitsubishi and the US entertainment company Disney. Luong points out that the paper and patent data from parat only range until early 2023, so they miss current developments.

Other metrics sometimes show overlooked AI activities, says Arnold. Savings now contain numbers for the number of AI jobs in a company, a metric based on data from the social media platform LinkedIn, which are most precise for US companies. It shows companies with "a pool of talents in the AI," he says. Amazon comes first with 14,000 jobs, but is closely followed by the international advisory company Accenture. Large advisory companies act as a 'mercenary' for AI projects for other companies and in the government, says Arnold.

It is important to look at the activities of companies from different perspectives, he adds. "We have heard a lot of discussions about 'Who leads in AI?'