Google lawsuit
Today marks an important event when Google reaches a settlement in a patent infringement complaint regarding processors that fuel the company’s artificial intelligence technology as filed by the federal court in Massachusetts.
It is however noted that the agreement was reached on the same day that trial closing arguments for Singular Computing’s case, which demanded $1.67 billion in damages from Google for allegedly misusing its inventions in computer processing, were slated to start.
It has take quite some time for the settlement details to become public. Google and Singular representatives acknowledged the settlement however, they did not offer any other related details.
The business is pleased to have resolved this matter and clarified that we did not infringe upon Singular’s patent rights
According to Google representative Jose Castaneda,
Joseph Bates, a computer scientist from Massachusetts who established Singular, asserted that Google integrated his technology into processing units that enable artificial intelligence (AI) functions in Google Search, Gmail, Google Translate, and other Google services.
The 2019 lawsuit entails that, Bates gave the business access to his innovations between 2010 and 2014. It claimed that Bates’ technology was plagiarized and that two patents were violated by Google’s Tensor Processing Units.
In order to enable AI usage for speech recognition, content creation, ad suggestion, and other tasks, Google unveiled the units in 2016. Singular claimed that the devices’ versions 2 and 3, which were released in 2017 and 2018, infringed on its patent rights.
In internal emails that were presented as evidence during the trial’s opening arguments on January 9, Google’s now-chief scientist Jeff Dean wrote to others about how Bates’ ideas could be “really well suited” for what Google was creating.
Google retorted that the designers of its chips were autonomous and had never met Bates. The technology being offered by the company is allegedly fundamentally different than what is described in Singular’s patents.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, who oversaw the case, prohibited Google from using its vast quantities of user data to conduct background checks on jurors, gain access to their social media accounts, or search for any pertinent public information that would shed light on the jurors’ perspectives before the trial started on January 8. Google searches for jurors would constitute a unwarranted (and asymmetrical) invasion of their privacy, according to the judge, which gave the internet giant an unfair advantage over its much smaller opponent in the action.
Sunstein LLP and Prince Lobel Tye LLP are Singular’s legal representatives while Wolf Greenfield & Sacks PC, Paul Hastings LLP, Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, Keker Van Nest & Peters LLP, and Kwun Bhansali Lazarus LLP are the firms that represented Google.
Business Wise
As stated in court documents, Singular stated that Google leverages public engagement with these services to enhance its Ads platform. This reportedly brings in at least tens of billions of dollars in profit for Google annually.
The vast increase in processing power made possible by Bates’ architecture, the jury was informed, allowed Google to forgo the construction of more costly data centers in order to house the servers for its expanded suite of services. According to Singular, Google estimated it in 2017 in order to meet rising demand, it would be necessary to at least double its number of data centers in the US at a cost of at least $10 billion.
