That would be a pretty plausible explanation of why Le has gone completely silent about that paper. I assumed the worst when I read your comment; I figured tha

That would be a pretty plausible explanation of why Le has gone completely silent about that paper. I assumed the worst when I read your comment; I figured that neural net semantics was going to stall for 17 years the same way that basic morphology did when Xerox patented FSTs. But it looks like word2vec is Apache-licensed, meaning the patent can only be used defensively. Phew.