It'll be interesting to see how this one goes. A lot of this falls under obviousness. Hardware parallelization of NNs will follow similar paths that anyone skilled in the art would follow. Such paths can't be protected by patent, at least, not for long. If Google is forced to invalidate this patent through obviousness, then this could open similar designs to anyone who can afford an ASIC production run.
I wouldn't hold my breath. Patents seem to be granted purely based on the power and persistence of your patent attorney or team of parent attorneys.
Look at the Amazon one click checkout. Extremely obvious, there was prior art, how you can patent something as obvious as storing the customer's credit card information is beyond me.
The EU patent office at least had the brains to reject the patent for obviousness.
> The EU patent office at least had the brains to reject the patent for obviousness.
This helps, and actually, the one-click patent has shaken up the courts a bit. The company I worked for was sued by a competitor over a baseless patent infringement. I compiled a three inch thick document full of references to prior art, and we hired an industry expert to write this up and act as an expert witness. When they saw the name of the expert witness and knew that we were going straight for invalidation, they folded and we settled out of court. I can't talk to any of the specifics, but it's a much different world now, even with first-to-file. But, you have to be aggressive in your defense.
I don't know the merits of this case. The article is lean on details. But, unless the patent covers something quite specific that is definitely being used by the TPUs and isn't obvious, invalidation is a great strategy to bring the case to a favorable out-of-court settlement. Gamble the value of the patent against the value of claiming that you got Google to settle for an "undisclosed amount". Even settling for $1 and an agreement not to sue each other further makes the patent valuable enough to sell to someone else as a defensive patent.
So the win was that you settled out of court? They didn't just drop the suit? You actually paid them money to go away and they got to claim you settled?
I can't get into the specifics, but settling out of court doesn't necessarily mean that the defendant pay anything. Consider that by both sides agreeing to drop the suit, alternative negotiations could be made.
I'll let you read between the lines. The plaintiff wants to sue a highly visible competitor over a patent. The competitor -- the defendant -- makes motions to begin the process of invalidating the plaintiff's patent based on very strong evidence. Suddenly, the case is settled out of court.
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/10/google_tpu_patent_dis...