Ant Group Recognized for Innovation Excellence As a Top 100 Global Innovator 2024

HANGZHOU, China–(BUSINESS WIRE)–For the third consecutive year, Ant Group, a global digital technology provider, has been recognized as a Top 100 Global Innovator™ 2024 by Clarivate™, a global leader in connecting people and organizations to intelligence they can trust to transform their world. This recognition reaffirms Ant Group’s ongoing commitment to innovation excellence in technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.

Gordon Samson, President, Intellectual Property, Clarivate, said, “We congratulate Ant Group for being named as a Top 100 Global Innovator again. To feature as a Top 100 Global Innovator is no mean feat as maintaining an edge in the innovation ecosystem is harder than ever. Organizations must balance experimentation and risk with discipline and reward. We measure and rank innovative performance in a dynamic and thorough way, using live thresholds of differentiation. At Clarivate, we think forward by analyzing the quality of ideas, their potency and their impact to identify the world’s top innovators, and this year we reveal the ranking of these innovators for the first time.”

As of the end of 2023, Ant Group had filed 32,459 patent applications globally, with 22,102 patents granted. The top three categories of these patent applications are security technology, blockchain and AI.

“Our recognition by Clarivate as one of the Top 100 Global Innovators is a testament to our innovation capabilities,” said Shen PAN, Director of Patents at Ant Group. “We are committed to leveraging technology to build trust and accelerate digital transformation across industries. Our journey is driven by our advancements in key technologies such as blockchain, privacy computing, security technology, Internet of Things (IoT) databases, and most notably, AI.”

In the field of AI, Ant Group has been continuously leveraging its technology to enhance the user experience across its product offerings for years. As of the end of 2023, Ant Group had filed over 3,000 AI-related patents. During Alipay’s 2024 Chinese New Year campaign, AI features in the app attracted 600 million interactions.

To facilitate technological advancement across industries, Ant Group has been making its innovations publicly accessible to developers in the open-source community. For example, Ant Group’s AI infrastructure team open-sourced ATorch, an extension library of PyTorch, that can improve GPU utilization rate up to 60% in large-scale pre-trainings of Large Language Models (LLMs). Meanwhile, the company’s open-sourced Lookahead achieves lossless generation accuracy for LLMs while boosting the inference speeds of LLMs by 2 to 6 times.

By the end of 2023, the number of open-source repositories from Ant Group on platforms such as GitHub had exceeded 1,900. Additionally, according to the 2023 Blue Paper on the Development of Open Source in China published by China OSS Promotion Union (COPU), Ant Group is recognized as one of the top three organizations in the country in terms of open-source contributions and influence.

Leveraging its innovations in technologies such as blockchain, privacy computing, security technology, IoT, and databases, Ant Group provides technology products and services to support the digital transformation and collaboration of global enterprise customers across a variety of industries. These industries include banking, telecommunication, real estate, medicine and energy. The company has garnered recognition from various organizations for its excellence in delivering innovative products and services to customers. For example, AntChain was recognized by Forbes on the Blockchain 50 list for five consecutive years (from 2019 to 2023). In September 2023, ZOLOZ was named as a Representative Vendor for the second consecutive time in the latest Gartner Market Guide for Identity Verification.

Methodology

The Top 100 Global Innovators uses a complete comparative analysis of global invention data to assess the strength of every patented idea, using measures tied directly to their innovative power.

To move from the individual idea strength to identify the organizations that create them more consistently and frequently, Clarivate sets two threshold criteria that potential candidates must meet and then adds a measure of their patented innovation output over the past five years.

For full information on the methodology used to identify the 2024 list, see here.

About Clarivate

Clarivate™ is a leading global provider of transformative intelligence. We offer enriched data, insights & analytics, workflow solutions and expert services in the areas of Academia & Government, Intellectual Property and Life Sciences & Healthcare. For more information, please visit www.clarivate.com

About Ant Group

Ant Group traces its roots back to Alipay, which was established in 2004 to create trust between online sellers and buyers. Over the years, Ant Group has grown to become one of the world’s leading open Internet platforms.

Through technological innovation, Ant Group supports its partners in providing inclusive, convenient digital life and digital financial services to consumers and SMEs. In addition, it has been introducing new technologies and products to support the digital transformation of industries and facilitate industrial collaboration. Working together with global partners, the company enables merchants and consumers to make and receive payments and remit around the world.

Contacts

Clarivate
Jack Wan

Zhihong.Wan@clarivate.com

Ant Group
Le Shen

Shenle.sl@antgroup.com