China Tops Global List in Generative AI Use

83% of Chinese business leaders use generative AI, making it the most popular type of AI in the world.

A new survey shows that China is the leader in the world when it comes to using generative AI. Today’s announcement is the latest proof that the country is making progress in the area, which gained worldwide attention when OpenAI’s ChatGPT went live in late 2022.

A poll of 1,600 business leaders around the world by SAS and Coleman Parkes Research, an American AI and analytics software company, found that 83% of Chinese respondents used generative AI. This is the technology that makes ChatGPT work.

Those numbers were higher than those from the 16 other areas and countries surveyed. In the US, for example, 65% of people who answered said they had used GenAI.In the world, the average was 54%. Banking, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, insurance, retail, and energy were some of the businesses that were looked at.

The findings show that China is making great strides in the field of generative AI. This progress sped up after Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, which led dozens of Chinese companies to release their own versions.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation of the United Nations released a study last week that showed China was ahead in the GenAI patent race. Between 2014 and 2023, China filed more than 38,000 patents, while the US only filed 6,276.

China’s Growing Domestic Generative AI Industry

Many of the biggest foreign generative AI service providers, like OpenAI, are limited in China. With tech giants like ByteDance and startups like Zhipu giving their services, the country has built a strong domestic industry.

In China, businesses are likely to use generative AI more quickly because of a price war that will likely lower the cost of big language model services for businesses even more. The SAS study also said that China was the world leader in continuous automated monitoring (CAM). It called CAM a controversial but widely used application of generative AI tools.

SAS’s vice president of applied AI and modelling, Udo Sglavo, said that this technology can collect and analyse a lot of data about what people do, how they act, and what they say. This can violate their privacy because they don’t know how much information is being gathered or how it is being used.