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Comment by hertzrat | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it likely that patent law is going to lock ai down? One company will finally crack something general-enough in a way that gets it way ahead, will patent it, and will use that monopoly to gain control of the whole space, and the monopoly will never go away because all further improvements will also get patented by the ai legal team?

The brief openness of ai right now is a glitch in the system that will get ironed out soon. Only megacorps, and countries that ignore patent law, will be able to afford to license the patents to do any significant ai work at all

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It's pretty rare that patent law makes a big difference in slowing down a field of software innovation. The main examples I can think of are eFax suing fax machine software companies, and Blackboard suing education companies.

In particular the large tech companies simply ignore all existing patents, develop what they want, and defend themselves in court if need be. Google is never going to say "well someone else got a key patent, let's give up development in the AI space".

It is heavily unlikely that there is exactly one route to intelligence: to take a card from biology, look at octopuses versus humans. Since only relatively specific architectures can be patented, I expect that one would have no issue circumventing any patent that could claimed.

This wasn't true of software, so I don't know that we should expect it to be true of AI.

But that's because the laws on software developed prior to tech becoming as powerful as they are now.

The problem with patenting AI is that you have to describe how something works in order to patent it. The issue presently is that you can describe relatively obvious things (e.g. one click checkout) and patent those.

AI is really a black box, which should make patenting specific implementations of it very difficult. Even if you do manage to patent something like a diffusion model of image creation, in order to enforce it against someone who was willing to go to court, you'd have to get into a deeper discussion of exactly how your AI works than you may want to.

My guess is AI will be more the realm of trade secrets than patents - it'll be the Coke recipe of big tech.

The patent would apply to the model's architecture rather than the trained values so the black box nature of deep learning doesn't matter too much.

anti-trust law would prevent the most egregious forms of this

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