Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

OptimizedGarbage t1_jcahlxb wrote

Reply to comment by KingsmanVince in [D] What do people think about OpenAI not releasing its research but benefiting from others’ research? Should google meta enforce its patents against them? by [deleted]

Google has patents on a lot of common deep learning methods, most notably dropout. They just don't enforce them (for now).

31

satireplusplus t1_jcbq2ik wrote

> most notably dropout.

Probably unenforable and math shouldn't be patentable. Might as well try to patent matrix multiplications (I'm sure someone tried). Also dropout isn't even complex math. It's an elementwise multiplication with randomized 1's and 0's, thats all it is.

17

impossiblefork t1_jccknnx wrote

There are workarounds though.

Dropconnect isn't patent encumbered (degrades feature detectors/neurons by dropping connections instead of disabling them) and is, I think better than dropout.

Similarly, with transformers, Google has a patent on encoder-decoder architectures, so everyone uses decoder-only architectures, etc.

Some companies are probably going to patent critical AI/ML things, but that hasn't really happened yet and I don't believe that any patent encumbered method is currently either critical or even optimal.

3

Deep-Station-1746 t1_jcamy6n wrote

Patenting a dropout feels a lot like NFTs - it's useless. So why bother?

Edit:

What I don't understand is how can anyone prove that someone is multiplying together matrices in some way as long as they don't admit to that themselves.

That's like someone patenting a thought. If you think about a particular patented pair of pants™, can you be sued for propagating a patented neural activity through your bio network? It's absurd.

−13

OptimizedGarbage t1_jcazllh wrote

You can sue people who use it for millions of dollars and drive them out of business. Which is exactly how Google uses most of its other patents, as a club to beat competitors with.

9

bartturner t1_jcbi0ry wrote

> Which is exactly how Google uses most of its other patents, as a club to beat competitors with.

That is ridiculous. Where has Google gone after anyone? They do it purely for defensive purposes.

3

DigThatData t1_jcbdeka wrote

i don't see the analogy here, i'm wondering if maybe you're misunderstanding: they have a patent over the technique. not "a dropout", all dropout.

6