China and the US are dominating the global artificial intelligence race

China and the United States are leading the way in the quest to dominate the world of artificial intelligence, a study by the United Nations has found. It found US tech giants IBM and Microsoft had the largest AI portfolios, with 8,920 and 5,930 different patents, respectively. China however, accounted for 17 of the top 20 academic institutions involved in patenting AI and was particularly strong in the fast growing area of'deep learning'. This process was recently used to create a'self-aware' robot that is capable of imagining itself. Other machines have complex speech recognition systems.