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Google Applies For Patents That Touch On Fundamental AI Concepts
mikejuk writes: Google may have been wowing the web with its trippy images from neural networks but meanwhile it has just revealed that it has applied for at least six patents on fundamental neural network and AI [concepts]. This isn't good for academic research or for the development of AI by companies. The patents are on very specific things invented by Geoffrey Hinton's team like using drop out during training, or modifying data to provide additional training cases, but also include very general ideas such as classification itself. If Google was granted a patent on classification it would cover just about every method used for pattern recognition! You might make the charitable assumption that Google has just patented the ideas so that it can protect them — i.e. to stop other more evil companies from patenting them and extracting fees from open source implementations of machine learning libraries. Google has just started an AI arms race, and you can expect others to follow.
What's stopping academic research on ideas covered by patents?
The source of the grants/funding?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
"Google has a gun pointed at my head. They haven't promised not to pull the trigger, but they haven't pull the trigger yet. So I've got that going for me." -- AI software developer
Request for prior art on Google patent application. Don't let Google point a gun at our heads. Get their patent applications rejected with prior art.