Session: Safeguarding Innovation: Navigating Patent Challenges in the Expanding AI Landscape
It is an understatement to say that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is large, growing, and increasingly the focus of businesses, technology providers and investors. Leveraging large language model (LLM) machine learning has brought incredible investment, growth, innovation and adoption of AI. The global AI market, valued at over $136 billion in 2022, is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.3%, between 2023 to 2030 – when it is estimated to reach approximately $1.7 trillion annually.
An outsized driver in this innovative field has been the open source community. LLaMa, Bloom, BERT and Falcon are open source LLMs, amongst dozens – varying in size, capabilities and extended ecosystems.
Given the enormous market potential of AI, numbers of AI/ML related patent holdings are growing rapidly. In 2020, the USPTO reported it received 80,000 patent applications involving AI, up over 150% from 2022. In the fall of 2023, the USPTO said that AI appeared in more than 18 percent of all patent applications.
As is inevitable, aggressive corporations and patent assertion entities (PAEs), also known as patent trolls, have sought to leverage patents to gain positional or financial advantages. VoiceTech Corporation, Ascend IP and Xockets have enjoined companies in AI related, patent lawsuits.
In many ways, there are parallels today in Open Source AI that compare to the turn of the century in Linux. This appears to be the early stages of what is likely to become a large trend for companies building and leveraging AI technology.
Keith Bergelt, the CEO of Open Invention Network, will touch upon these issues and discuss ways to limit patent attacks against open source AI development, adoption and use.
Key takeaways for participants will include:
- What is being done in a larger context to hinder AI patent-related activities toward the open source community
- Potential solutions for businesses and organizations already under threat from AI patent attacks
- Ways to mitigate potential patent threats towards AI developers and users
