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liaochris / USPTO_AI

Project on the USPTO AI dataset
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Exploratory Figures #1

Open liaochris opened 2 years ago

liaochris commented 2 years ago

Opening issue to discuss initial exploratory figures

liaochris commented 2 years ago

Here is an explanation of some of the most interesting exploratory figures I produced

  1. Domestic and International Institutions: This figure describes the proportion of AI patents made by American vs. Non-American institutions. A lot has been said about how other countries are beating America in the AI space, in fact, patents filed at the USPTO by American institutions dropped to its low in 1990 before rising throughout the 2010s and remaining at that same level ever since.
    • A statistic by AI Type exists and from what we can see, the US lags behind in computer vision compared to other AI types in terms of global innovation
  2. Publications by Top 20 Publishers: This figure describes the proportion of patents published in each year by the top 20 patent publishers. The proportion of patents published by this group peaked at over 30% in 2009/2010 and has steadily declined ever since.
    • Perhaps this reflects decreasing market concentration?
    • This trend is also reflected in the figure by AI Type, which suggests that there is not a particular field of AI where new entrants are particular disadvantaged
  3. New Patents: This figure describes the proportion of patents produced by companies who had published their first AI patent in the last 5 years. It is intended to measure the percentage of innovation produced by new institutions versus incumbents.It seems like the proportion has steadily declined over time, which makes sense as more and more companies enter the space and surpass the 5 year mark.
    • In the last five years, this figure began to rise again - perhaps this reflects some advantage new entrants have in innovation that relates to current AI trends? this was calculated incorrectly, it actually stagnates. Combined with the loss in market share by the top 20, suggests that mid-stage companies are doing well?
    • The trend also applies in the figure by AI Type
  4. Patent Claims: This figure describes the mean number of claims made per patent over time, separated by AI category type. What's interesting is that the number of claims grew over time initially and then started declining - so institutions had less and less items they wanted to protect. Moreover, this trend is similar across all types of AI.
    • Not sure what this suggests - perhaps increasing complexity of AI patents, so less claims can be made?
    • Perhaps some policy caused a change in claims made? Although this wouldn't explain the continued decline
  5. Proportion Published by Company Age: This figure describes the proportion of patents published by companies in their each n-th decade in each year. As we can see from the massive that occurs in each decade line, there is one (or maybe a few) companies with start years that were very close to each other that publish a lot of patents every year, and continue to do so.
    • Proportion Published by Company Age also tells us the ratio of patents to assignee, or how productive a company is at producing patents, on a log scale. As we can see, older companies are more productive, likely because there are less of them and they are larger