News Google settles ahead of closing arguments in Singular Computing’s $1.67 billion AI tech patent trial

[Admin]

Google has settled ahead of the scheduled closing arguments in Singular Computing’s $1.67 billion AI tech patent trial. However, it still insists it didn't use SIngular's technologies, and the settlement sum wasn't revealed.

Google settles ahead of closing arguments in Singular Computing’s $1.67 billion AI tech patent trial : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

Stay classy Google

 

[das_stig]

In other words, Google knew they used unlicenced IP, tried the old delay tactics to make the other party spend millions in legal fees hoping they will give up, settle in Googles favour or go bust. Now the court decision looked be going against them, so cheaper to settle out of court. Usual Mega Corp tactics, that should be outlawed, but that's low life USA business models for you, protect the rich !

 

[bit_user]

at the start of the court case, it argued that it created its TPU designs independently.

I find this quite plausible. Based on what that single image shows, Singular's ideas weren't particularly non-obvious.

Floating-point arithmetic has been around for more than 50 years, with people tweaking the range & precision to suit the application. In fact, back in 2008, IEEE 754 was updated to include support for 16-bit floats, which OpenGL (and presumably Direct3D?) then incorporated.

As for having a 2D array of processing elements, that's old hat for computer architectures involving any kind of HPC or parallel processing.

Unless there were some more novel ideas that were duplicated in Google's products in some way that couldn't be coincidental, I'd say this smells like a patent troll looking for a payday. It may even be that the Singular founder truly believes his ideas were novel and unique gems, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were.

 

[bit_user]

Google knew they used unlicenced IP,

It's a big company. They said the TPU team didn't meet with this company and that's entirely plausible. You can't assume complete information efficiency, in an organization of that size.

tried the old delay tactics to make the other party spend millions in legal fees hoping they will give up, settle in Googles favour or go bust.

That's only one possible interpretation. I take it you've never dealt with patent trolls?

Now the court decision looked be going against them, so cheaper to settle out of court.

Or, it could be that the plaintiff was willing to settle for an amount that was cheaper for Google than continuing to fight it. Sadly, we'll never know how strong their evidence was, nor the terms of the settlement, because such information is only public if/when the matter actually goes to court.

In the event this was (effectively) a patent trolling situation, I applaud Google for holding out as long as they did. Patent trolls are parasites triggering higher prices on the products and services we all use. Worse yet, they disincentivize innovation and hurt business and employment opportunities in the tech sector.