Comment by aswegs8
16 hours ago
Actually reminds me of patent law. Prior art ist a defined term which includes all standard literature on one topic. To evaluate, whether the new solution is really inventive and thus patentable, one consults prior art, selects the most promising starting point, and from there asks oneself if an all-knowing but uncreative specialist would come up with the solution by himself. If he wouldn't, the condition of inventiveness is satisfied.
Makes me wonder how the patent space will be disrupted when that inventiveness step becomes obsolete because of LLMs. Given your example above, it seems like a combination of different methods from many different sources. This would be regarded as inventive, clearly. If eligible patents can now be brute-forced, the bottleneck becomes only selecting the most promising ones and paying for the patent.
Oh man, we should talk. I have been working on a patent with ChatGPT specifically to get around two complementary patents that are now together because of a corporate merger this year. I am not sure how much longer anything is going to be patentable with this kind of design assistance available to everyone.
Also, once upon a time I wanted to be a patent lawyer. It's incredibly hard to sit for the patent bar if you have a pure math degree and don't have an engineering degree. Thankfully New Hampshire lets anyone sit for the FE exam.