Background
Content-generating AI has the potential to disrupt a wide range of knowledge and intelligence-based industries.
OpenAI has captured the public's imagination, but its lack of a defensive patent strategy, coupled with a projected revenue over $1bn in the near term, exposes it to material risks of inbound assertion from innovators and invention owners in this space.
Microsoft announced in January 2023 the third phase of a long-term partnership with OpenAI to accelerate AI breakthroughs. This investment, rumoured to be around $10bn, follows on from previous investments made in 2019 and 2021 and extends the companies' collaboration across AI super-computing and research.
So who are OpenAI and what are their aims?
OpenAI describes itself as an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
The company was founded by tech investors including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Sam Altman in 2015, with headquarters in San Francisco.
OpenAI recently went viral following the November 2022 launch of a free preview of its AI chatbot ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer.
It is based on a language model called GPT-3 which is trained on large open datasets and aimed at generating natural language answers to questions, but with other functions including translation and improvised text generation.
With OpenAI's projected revenues forecast to exceed $1bn by 2024, ChatGPT-3 has the potential to open up a whole new market around content-creating AI.
The chatbot has launched a completely new way to interact with information and to generate complex answers to a myriad of questions.
OpenAI – and open source
An interesting fact is that OpenAI does not appear to have any published patents either pending or granted.
In a blog post titled 'Introducing OpenAI' published in 2015 the company founders shared their aims, including
'As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world.
'We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.'
This open-sourced approach may work for a non-profit with idealistic goals. However, it now presents risks to OpenAI's commercial strength given its shift in 2019 towards a for-profit model.
Patents are a great way to demonstrate priority and to protect against assertions from both non-practising entities (NPEs) and technology competitors.
Patents are a key part of a technology-rich IP strategy. OpenAI is likely to be an outlier in high-tech in terms of its lack of appetite for patents.
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