If you're looking for a global update on the world of patents and generative AI (GenAI), look no further than the recent Patent Landscape Report: Generative AI by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Not only will it bring you up to speed on who's filing the most GenAI patents, who's publishing the most GenAI research, and which countries most GenAI patents are coming out of, but it also contains a number of unexpected gems like the one found in the quote below. You might guess that given how large language models (LLMs) dominate the media's attention these days, they'd be leading the pack in GenAI patents filed. Well think again. Good old Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) claim the top spots.

Among these GenAI models, most patents belong to GANs. Between 2014 and 2023, there were 9,700 patent families of this model type, with 2,400 patent families published in 2023 alone.

VAEs and LLMs are the second and third largest models in terms of patents, with around 1,800 and 1,300 new patent families respectively between 2014 and 2023.