Technology

Technology Hype Cycles

Published

10 years ago

August 14, 2014

Jeff Desjardins

Technology Hype Cycles

Hype occurs in cycles. It starts with the introduction of a concept and thinking about the possibilities.The more that is possible, the higher expectations rise.

Then it’s time to take the medicine and figure out the exact reality of the situation. Often it is less than expected, and much work is still to be done to bring an idea to fruition.

Every year, Garner publishes a great resource called the Technology Hype Cycle. We did a quick re-design above. It takes all the broad concepts in technology, and plots them along a typical plot that shows expectations over time. For any retail investor looking at technology opportunities, taking this into consideration is imperative. Before proper revenue and profit generation, many deals operate on these sets of expectations.

At Visual Capitalist, we try to cover these upcoming opportunities to show investors their potential. Over the past couple of years, we’ve covered things such as Bitcoin, 3D Printing, Wearable Tech, The Internet of Things, and Graphene to keep you on the forefront of innovation.

Like the resource investment lifecycle, this hype cycle creates broad opportunities for the savvy investor. Two obvious ways to take advantage:

1) Identify a broad category of technology as it comes as an innovation trigger, and find early stage investments to ride the increasing expectations.

2) Identify companies that are on the way to successfully realizing the potential of technologies that are new but where the shine has worn off. For example: enterprise 3d printing, virtual reality, and cloud computing.

Virtual reality, as an example, was cool around 15 years ago. Now people have forgotten about it. However, there are companies that are on the verge of revolutionizing the field and it will be in the news again soon.

Related Topics:tech tech hype cycles technology cycles tech expectations

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Technology

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

See which countries have been granted the most AI patents each year, from 2012 to 2022.

Published

7 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Marcus Lu

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

This infographic shows the number of AI-related patents granted each year from 2010 to 2022 (latest data available). These figures come from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), accessed via Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index Report.

From this data, we can see that China first overtook the U.S. in 2013. Since then, the country has seen enormous growth in the number of AI patents granted each year.

Year	China	EU and UK	U.S.	RoW	Global Total
2010	307	137	984	571	1,999
2011	516	129	980	581	2,206
2012	926	112	950	660	2,648
2013	1,035	91	970	627	2,723
2014	1,278	97	1,078	667	3,120
2015	1,721	110	1,135	539	3,505
2016	1,621	128	1,298	714	3,761
2017	2,428	144	1,489	1,075	5,136
2018	4,741	155	1,674	1,574	8,144
2019	9,530	322	3,211	2,720	15,783
2020	13,071	406	5,441	4,455	23,373
2021	21,907	623	8,219	7,519	38,268
2022	35,315	1,173	12,077	13,699	62,264

In 2022, China was granted more patents than every other country combined.

While this suggests that the country is very active in researching the field of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily mean that China is the farthest in terms of capability.

Key Facts About AI Patents

According to CSET, AI patents relate to mathematical relationships and algorithms, which are considered abstract ideas under patent law. They can also have different meaning, depending on where they are filed.

In the U.S., AI patenting is concentrated amongst large companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google. On the other hand, AI patenting in China is more distributed across government organizations, universities, and tech firms (e.g. Tencent).

In terms of focus area, China’s patents are typically related to computer vision, a field of AI that enables computers and systems to interpret visual data and inputs. Meanwhile America’s efforts are more evenly distributed across research fields.

Learn More About AI From Visual Capitalist

If you want to see more data visualizations on artificial intelligence, check out this graphic that shows which job departments will be impacted by AI the most.