Comment by muragekibicho
1 day ago
I'm working on fighting IBM's patent trolls. IBM slapped the words 'AI Interpretability' on Gauss' 200 year old continued fractions and was awarded a patent.
Now they can charge rent if they encounter a continued fraction library in the wild.
It's bizarre
Have they actually tried to sue anyone for infringement? Kind of a moot point unless they do.
They haven't and that's the crux of it all: they can sue if they want or when they want.
Interesting.
Do you have a link to the patent?
Here it is: https://patents.justia.com/patent/20230401438
On Google Patents: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20230401438A1/en
The authors simply implement a continued fraction library in Pytorch and call the backward() function on the resulting computation graph.
That is, they chain linear neural network layers and use the reciprocal (not RELU ) as the primary non-linearity.
The authors reinvent the wheel countless times:
1. They rename continued fractions and call them ‘ladders’. 2. They label basic division ‘The 1/z nonlinearity’. 3. Ultimately, they take the well-defined concept of Generalized Continued Fractions and call them CoFrNets and got a patent.
IBM's lawyers can strip out all the buzzword garbage if they feel litigious and sue anyone whose written a continued fraction library. Because, that's what the patent (without all the buzzwords) protects.
Thanks for that. That is patently absurd.
You sent me down a rabbit hole. In trying to track it down for myself I read a couple of others that I thought might be it, and was stunned by how obtuse these patents are.
What sort of leverage does this stuff provide? You mentioned "charge rent". What does that look like?
1 reply →