3 ms·

Just look at the patents that are being claimed. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9218156B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9218156B2/en https://paten

Just look at the patents that are being claimed. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9218156B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9218156B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8407273B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US8407273B2/en This is embarrassing. It's just patenting the idea that you would have low precision hardware for math operations and then extend the results back out so the program doesn't know. A patent troll at its worst. I've never heard of this guy (and I'm an ML researcher) but the idea that you would give up a bit of precision for performance during training (and particularly during inference!) has been around forever. The amount of prior art for this idea is.. obscene. The patent examiners did not do their jobs at all.

tdullien 3y ago
US Patent examiners have for decades been very much of the position to not worry much about existing prior art when granting patents, relying instead on the idea that people will challenge and overturn patents when necessary (this applies to the non-obviousness bar, too). This, coupled with a tendency for Patent examiners to have a subsequent well-paid career drafting patents, has lead to thousands of sketchy patents on the books that have high odds of being overturned, but only if a sufficiently resourced party challenges them. We shall see how these patents hold up...
- pan69 3y ago
  It's a completely broken system (as we all already know). Why have "examiners" at all? The way it should probably work is; if a patent is overturned in court, then the patent office should bare the legal costs.
wslh 3y ago
I remember, before GPUs, that using 32 (i386) bits instead of the FPU for fast 3D operations was common.
jacobgorm 3y ago
The guy does not claim to be an ML researcher, looks more like a Computer Architecture person, so the fact that you never heard of him does not make him a nobody or mean anything really. No ideas have been around "forever", things that may seem obvious to you now often cost other people years of research to come up with. The better the idea, the more obvious it typically appears in hindsight. If Jeff Dean was aware of the work as the Register article states, it probably was significant, and hopefully Google will pay the inventor for his ideas.
boringuser2 3y ago
I've never heard of you, does that mean you have no ability to litigate?

tdullien 3y ago

US Patent examiners have for decades been very much of the position to not worry much about existing prior art when granting patents, relying instead on the idea that people will challenge and overturn patents when necessary (this applies to the non-obviousness bar, too). This, coupled with a tendency for Patent examiners to have a subsequent well-paid career drafting patents, has lead to thousands of sketchy patents on the books that have high odds of being overturned, but only if a sufficiently resourced party challenges them. We shall see how these patents hold up...

pan69 3y ago
It's a completely broken system (as we all already know). Why have "examiners" at all? The way it should probably work is; if a patent is overturned in court, then the patent office should bare the legal costs.

wslh 3y ago

I remember, before GPUs, that using 32 (i386) bits instead of the FPU for fast 3D operations was common.

jacobgorm 3y ago

The guy does not claim to be an ML researcher, looks more like a Computer Architecture person, so the fact that you never heard of him does not make him a nobody or mean anything really. No ideas have been around "forever", things that may seem obvious to you now often cost other people years of research to come up with. The better the idea, the more obvious it typically appears in hindsight. If Jeff Dean was aware of the work as the Register article states, it probably was significant, and hopefully Google will pay the inventor for his ideas.

boringuser2 3y ago

I've never heard of you, does that mean you have no ability to litigate?