On Wednesday, Google settled a patent infringement lawsuit. According to a filing made in the Massachusetts federal court, the lawsuit was filed over the chips that power the company’s AI (artificial intelligence) technology.
The settlement news emerged on the same day when the schedule for closing arguments was decided to start in a trial. The trial began with Singular Computing’s lawsuit, which demanded $1.67 billion for damages caused by Google’s “misuse of its computer-processing innovations.”
About The Google and Singular Computing Lawsuit
Details surrounding the lawsuit and settlement were not available immediately. Singular and Google’s representatives confirmed the emerging settlement but did not provide additional information. Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, stated that Google had not violated Singular’s patent rights and was “pleased to have resolved this matter.”
Joseph Bates, the computer scientist from Massachusetts who founded Singular, claimed that Google incorporated his technology into its processing units. These processing units now support AI features in various Google services, including Google Translate, Gmail, Google Search, and more.
The 2019 lawsuit claimed that between 2010 and 2014, Bates’ inventions were shared with the company. The lawsuit alleged that Bates’ technology was copied to Google’s Tensor Processing Units, and the company infringed on two patents. In 2016, Google introduced these units to power artificial intelligence for functions like ad recommendation, content generation, speech recognition, etc. Singular argued that versions 2 and 3 of the units, introduced in 2017 and 2018, violated the patent rights.
During the trial’s opening statements on January 9, internal emails were cited that showed Jeff Dean, Google’s now-chief scientist, wrote about well-suited ideas by Bates in Google’s development. However, in a counter-reply, Google said that the employees who designed the chips created them independently and never met Bates. Thus, the technology development was “fundamentally different than what is described in Singular’s patents.”
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