AI Giants
The observatory's chief analyst Zachary Arnold said the PARAT data can demonstrate that large Chinese companies are highly competitive in the AI field.
When ranked by the number of highly cited AI papers and preprints, three Chinese tech giants - Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei - all rank in the top ten.
Arnold said, "Many people still have a bias that China is large and can produce many results, but not truly first-class."
However, ETO calculated various quality-adjusted metrics, and Chinese companies "performed excellently" on these metrics.
According to PARAT data, the most cited paper among all AI research is "Attention Is All You Need," published in 2017.
The author team of this paper mainly came from Google, proposing the "unified" Transformer architecture.
Chinese institutions have also produced many high-quality studies, such as this paper jointly written by CUHK, Tencent, SenseTime, and other institutions, which proposed a real-time semantic segmentation method ICNet, with over 1.7k citations.
Among the top 10 companies that submitted the most AI patents in the past decade, only three are located in the United States, while the rest are distributed in China, Germany, and South Korea.
Top Employers
The data also highlights the diversity of the AI industry.
In addition to the five giants - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft - many companies in the "long tail" also have high citation counts.
Among the more well-known companies are OpenAI and Apple, as well as Disney and Mitsubishi of Japan, which are less known for AI innovation.
Luong pointed out that the paper and patent data collected in the database only goes up to the end of 2023, thus missing recent developments.
Arnold said that other metrics in PARAT reveal AI activities that are sometimes overlooked.
For example, PARAT covers the number of AI positions at various companies, collected from the social media platform LinkedIn.
This data is most accurate for US companies, from which we can see which companies have attracted the most AI talent.
By this metric, Amazon tops the list with 14,000 AI positions, but closely followed by multinational consulting firm Accenture. According to Arnold's description, large consulting firms are now "mercenaries" for AI projects of other companies and governments.
These data allow us to examine companies' dynamics in the AI field from multiple perspectives.
"We see a lot of discussion about 'who's leading in AI.' We're data geeks, we know there are many different types of data that can be used to answer this question, and they don't always point in exactly the same direction."