This week, Alphabet’s Google went before a federal jury in Boston to counter a US$1.67 billion lawsuit alleging that the tech giant infringed patents that cover the processors used to power artificial intelligence (AI) technology in Google products.
Kerry Timbers, lawyer for Singular Computing, founded by Massachusetts-based computer scientist Joseph Bates, told jurors that Google copied Bates’ AI technology after repeatedly meeting with him.
After Bates shared his computer-processing innovations with Google from 2010 to 2014, the company copied his patented technology rather than licensing it to develop its own AI-supporting chips, Timbers said.
Bates’ innovation has been used in Google’s Tensor Processing Units, which support AI features in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate, and other Google services, Timbers added.
In his opening statement to jurors, Timbers said, “This case is about something we all learned a long time ago: respect for others, do not take what does not belong to you, and give credit where credit is due.”
The Google employees who designed its chips never met Bates and designed them independently of the workers who did, Robert Van Nest, a lawyer for Google, said in response.
Bates was a “disappointed inventor” who had repeatedly failed to convince many companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, to use his technology, he added.
Van Nest claimed that Bates’ technology used approximate math that can generate “incorrect” calculations.
“Google’s chips are fundamentally different, fundamentally different, than what is described in Singular’s patents,” Van Nest told the jury.
Discover more from MEZIESBLOG
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.