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.

Comments

End of the World!

[Anonymous Coward]

Despair! all is lost!

These are american patents, just don't deal with america if they won't play nice.

Re:How does it hurt academic research?

[reve_etrange]

That's one good thing that comes from patents. Public disclosure of the ideas.

Or, as in this case, mostly pointless obfuscation of ideas previously disclosed by other, less greedy, people.