I think your model only applies to some famous cases, but ignored others. Who invented computers? Who invented television networks? Who invented the internet?
Lots of things have inventors and patents only for specific chunks of them, or specific versions, but are as a whole too big to be encompassed. They’re not necessarily very well defined technologies, but systems and concepts that can be implemented in many different ways. In these fields, focusing on patents is likely to be a losing strategy anyway as you’ll simply stand still to protect your one increasingly obsolete good idea like Homer Simpson in front of his sugar while everyone else runs circles around you with their legally distinct versions of the same thing that they keep iterating and improving on. I think AI and even LLMs fall under this category. It’s specifically quite hard to patent algorithms—and good thing too, or it would really have a chilling effect for the whole field. I think you can patent only a specific implementation of them, but that’s very limited; you can’t patent the concept of a self-attention layer, for example, as that’s just math. And that kind of thing is all it takes to build your own spin on an LLM anyway.
I think your model only applies to some famous cases, but ignored others. Who invented computers? Who invented television networks? Who invented the internet?
Lots of things have inventors and patents only for specific chunks of them, or specific versions, but are as a whole too big to be encompassed. They’re not necessarily very well defined technologies, but systems and concepts that can be implemented in many different ways. In these fields, focusing on patents is likely to be a losing strategy anyway as you’ll simply stand still to protect your one increasingly obsolete good idea like Homer Simpson in front of his sugar while everyone else runs circles around you with their legally distinct versions of the same thing that they keep iterating and improving on. I think AI and even LLMs fall under this category. It’s specifically quite hard to patent algorithms—and good thing too, or it would really have a chilling effect for the whole field. I think you can patent only a specific implementation of them, but that’s very limited; you can’t patent the concept of a self-attention layer, for example, as that’s just math. And that kind of thing is all it takes to build your own spin on an LLM anyway.