Google's Tensor Processing Units could have been developed using stolen designs | Hacker News Reader

Google's Tensor Processing Units could have been developed using stolen designs

theregister.com

65 pointswslh11 comments

According to Singular's website, the biz "develops and licenses hardware and software technologies for high-performance energy-efficient computing, both large scale and embedded."

Sounds like a patent troll.

Please have some respect for the little guy trying to make a living inventing things. We can't all be corporate drones, even if it pays well.

Why not? It's pretty effortless.

You left out quite a bit from that quote:

> Bates held research and teaching positions at Cornell, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Johns Hopkins universities in the US between 1980 until 2011. > > In 2005, Bates founded Singular Computing to commercialize various computing architectures.

Patent trolls don't commercialize anything, they just hold patents in order to attack people after they start using them.

Then there is also this:

> According to the complaint, Bates disclosed various technologies he had come up with to Google under a non-disclosure agreement on three occasions between 2010 and 2014.

I don't know if Singular's claims hold any ground, but based on the article it sounds nothing like a patent troll.

Looks like my most embellished resume ever somehow came to life.

But, yeah, to emphasize your point, patent trolls, in my experience, consist solely of attorneys and not industry researchers with extensive academic credentials. Smart on them to start the article with that.

Just look at the patents that are being claimed. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9218156B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8407273B2/en

This is embarrassing. It's just patenting the idea that you would have low precision hardware for math operations and then extend the results back out so the program doesn't know.

A patent troll at its worst. I've never heard of this guy (and I'm an ML researcher) but the idea that you would give up a bit of precision for performance during training (and particularly during inference!) has been around forever.

The amount of prior art for this idea is.. obscene. The patent examiners did not do their jobs at all.

US Patent examiners have for decades been very much of the position to not worry much about existing prior art when granting patents, relying instead on the idea that people will challenge and overturn patents when necessary (this applies to the non-obviousness bar, too).

This, coupled with a tendency for Patent examiners to have a subsequent well-paid career drafting patents, has lead to thousands of sketchy patents on the books that have high odds of being overturned, but only if a sufficiently resourced party challenges them.

We shall see how these patents hold up...

It's a completely broken system (as we all already know). Why have "examiners" at all? The way it should probably work is; if a patent is overturned in court, then the patent office should bare the legal costs.

I remember, before GPUs, that using 32 (i386) bits instead of the FPU for fast 3D operations was common.

The guy does not claim to be an ML researcher, looks more like a Computer Architecture person, so the fact that you never heard of him does not make him a nobody or mean anything really.

No ideas have been around "forever", things that may seem obvious to you now often cost other people years of research to come up with. The better the idea, the more obvious it typically appears in hindsight.

If Jeff Dean was aware of the work as the Register article states, it probably was significant, and hopefully Google will pay the inventor for his ideas.

I've never heard of you, does that mean you have no ability to litigate?

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