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Google Applies For Patents That Touch On Fundamental AI Concepts

Posted by timothy on from the locked-up-for-its-own-good dept.

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.

5 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How does it hurt academic research? by donaggie03 · · Score: 3, Informative

    What's stopping academic research on ideas covered by patents?

    The source of the grants/funding?

    --
    Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
  2. End of the World! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Despair! all is lost!

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

  3. Google has a 14 step plan by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Funny

    0 GOOGLE
    1 GOGGLE
    2 GIGGLE
    3 JIGGLE
    4 JINGLE
    5 JUNGLE
    6 BUNGLE
    7 BUNGEE
    8 BUNGED
    9 BUNKED
    10 BANKED
    11 BACKED
    12 PACKED
    13 PICKED
    14 WICKED

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  4. Stop the Patents by pubwvj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It is way past time to end all patents.
    Ideas are a dime a dozen.
    I have ten before breakfast and at least one is great.
    I invent things. I don't patent it, I implement.
    Time to end all patents.

  5. Re:For 100 points... by MacDork · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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.