Google Faces $1.67 Billion Damages Claim in AI-Related Patent Lawsuit

Alphabet’s Google appeared before a federal jury in Boston on Tuesday to argue against a computer scientist’s claims that it should pay his company $1.67 billion for infringing patents that allegedly cover processors used to power computer technology. artificial intelligence in Google products.

A lawyer for Singular Computing, founded by Massachusetts-based computer scientist Joseph Bates, told jurors that Google copied Bates’ technology after repeatedly meeting with him to discuss his ideas for solving a problem central to the development of AI. .

Attorney Kerry Timbers said that after Bates shared his computer processing innovations with Google from 2010 to 2014, the tech giant unknowingly copied his patented technology rather than granting him a license to develop its own AI-enabled chips.

Bates’ innovations were integrated into Google’s Tensor Processing Units and used to support artificial intelligence functions in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate and other Google services, Kerry said.

Internal emails cited in the case show that Google’s now-chief scientist, Jeff Dean, wrote to others about how Bates’ ideas might be “really suited” for what Google was developing. Another employee in an email said they were “quite corrupted by Joe’s ideas.”

“This case is about something we all learned a long time ago: respecting others, not taking what doesn’t belong to you, and giving credit where credit is due,” Timbers told the jury in his opening statement.

A Google lawyer, Robert Van Nest, responded that the Google employees who designed its chips never met Bates and designed them independently of the workers who made them.

He called Bates a “disappointed inventor” who had repeatedly failed to convince a host of companies, including Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, to use his technology. Van Nest said Bates’ technology uses rough math that can lead to “incorrect” calculations.

“Google’s chips are fundamentally different, fundamentally different, from what is described in Singular’s patents,” Van Nest told the jury.

Before the trial, Google had said that Singular had sought up to $7 billion in monetary damages for infringing its two patents. At trial, Timbers said Google should pay $1.67 billion.

Google introduced its processing units in 2016 to power AI used for speech recognition, content generation, ad recommendation and other functions. Singular said versions 2 and 3 of the units, introduced in 2017 and 2018, violate its patent rights.

A U.S. appeals court in Washington also heard arguments Tuesday on whether Singular’s patents should be invalidated in a separate case that Google appealed to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.