AI-linked trial demands $1.6 billion in damages from Google; technology employed in Google Search, Gmail, Translate under scrutiny
On Tuesday, Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, appeared in front of a federal jury in Boston to counter a computer scientist’s assertions that it owes his company $1.67 billion in damages for violating patents that supposedly encompass the processors utilized in Google’s artificial intelligence technology.
A lawyer for Singular Computing, founded by Massachusetts-based computer scientist Joseph Bates, told the judge that Google copied Bates’ technology after repeatedly meeting with him to discuss his ideas for solving a problem central to the development of artificial intelligence.
Attorney Kerry Timbers said that after Bates shared his computer processing innovations with Google between 2010 and 2014, the tech giant unknowingly copied his patented technology instead of licensing it to develop its own AI-powered chips.
Bates’ innovations were embedded in Google’s Tensor Processing Units and used to power AI features in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate and other Google services, Kerry said.
Internal emails cited in the case show that Jeff Dean, now Google’s chief scientist, wrote to others about how Bates’ ideas could “fit really well” into what Google was developing. Another employee said in an email that they were “pretty spoiled by Joe’s ideas.”
“This case is about something we all learned a long time ago: respect for others, don’t take what isn’t yours and give credit where credit is due,” Timbers told the judge in his opening statement.
Google attorney Robert Van Nest countered that the Google employees who designed the chips never met Bates and designed them independently of the employees who designed them.
He called Bates a “disappointed inventor” who repeatedly failed to convince countless companies, including Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. and ChatGPT creator OpenAI, to use his technology. According to Van Nest, Bates’ technique used approximate mathematics that could produce “erroneous” calculations.
“Google’s chips are fundamentally different, fundamentally different from those described in Singular’s patents,” Van Nest told the jury.
Before the lawsuit, Google had said that Singular had sought up to $7 billion in monetary damages for infringing two patents. In the lawsuit, Timbers said Google should pay $1.67 billion.
Google introduced its processing unit in 2016 to power artificial intelligence used for speech recognition, content creation, ad recommendations and other functions. Singular said that versions 2 and 3 of the units, which were introduced in 2017 and 2018, infringe on its patent rights.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington on Tuesday also heard arguments about the invalidation of Singular’s patents in a separate case that Google appealed from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
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