Technology

The Eccentric Habits of Tech Geniuses

Published

9 years ago

May 4, 2015

Jeff Desjardins

The Eccentric Habits of Tech Geniuses

The visionaries that innovate and build our technological world have a certain eccentricity that gets preserved over time. Unlike the CEOs of blue chip companies that have an almost institutional and stoic history, many of these founders do not have to go through the extensive corporate gauntlet where every personal idiosyncrasy is lost along the way.

Their uniqueness is embraced and sometimes vilified, but it usually sticks around. We’ve looked before at 26 Surprising Facts About Google and also 37 Surprising Facts About Apple, where the impact of the founders and their unique personality traits became embedded in the company culture.

Today’s infographic goes into some of the more unusual rituals taken by successful tech entrepreneurs and inventors. Probably the strangest is from Yoshiro Nakamatsu, at least partly responsible for the floppy disk, who relaxes in a 24k gold-tiled “calm room” that prevents radio and television waves from entering.

Shigeru Miyamoto is another Japanese tech genius who designed some of the most legendary video games on the Nintendo platform. Shigeru carries around measuring tape with him, so that he can use it to validate his guesses on the lengths of objects. This is totally a normal thing to do.

Original graphic from: WhoIsHostingThis

Technology

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

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

Published

16 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.