Mike Stohler: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today we're going to talk about AI. I know a lot of your ears just perked up, all of you Richer Geek tech guys out there. Robert Plotkin, he's an AI patent attorney or lawyer behind tomorrow's AI Giants. For 25 years he's a renowned AI patent attorney.
Robert Plotkin: I'm doing great, Mike. Thanks so much for having me today.
And then I started to see even back in the early two thousands, how the AI back then, it wasn't as powerful as it is now, but the AI back then was being used by people to accelerate the innovation process. People were using AI to help design drugs. People were using AI. Back then to design physical products like toothbrushes and antennas, and they're using AI to write software.
It was a lot of work directly for clients when AI wasn't a hot topic. And then of course, just about two years ago, almost two years to the day when ChatGPT launched. And that's when AI took the world by storm. And now everyone knows.
And they incorporate it into ChatGPT. Or into one of their other products, and then the small tech company can't compete with that. And over the last two years, there have been a ton of small AI companies that have launched and then been made obsolete when they've been out competed by a big tech company.
So let's talk about the fact that I didn't know that you could have a patent of any kind and then still get money passive income from it. Talk a little bit about how that works.
You can license the patent, which is like renting it in a sense. You can say to another company, "Oh, you want to manufacture this mousetrap? You're going to have to pay me a fee, a royalty on the patent in order for me to give you permission to manufacture that mousetrap." A way of generating licensing revenue from the patent.
For example, I use OpenAI to create a product. I patent that product. I make a lot of money in that product, but it was 100 percent made by OpenAI. Can OpenAI come and say, "Hey, wait a minute. That's actually mine, not yours?"
Mike Stohler: Yeah, I can see that. Microsoft or AWS, there's some of the big ones where, "Hey, look, you got to run AWS or Microsoft in order for this thing to work because it's built on their platform and that makes sense.
to sue more importantly for most of my clients that are small startups, right? As you said the two two things they want to do is either go public or get acquired 99% of the time some of them want to become the next Microsoft or Google there's very few companies that will achieve that in a generation, right?
It seems like that litigation would be just a game of, "I've got a bigger stick. I've got 30 or 40 at 3,000 an hour, 4,000 an hour." You've got your, is it a game of kings? How in the world could I ever compete in something like that?
So what that means is you're an individual, you've got a patent portfolio, you're not going to be able to shell out millions of dollars for patent litigation. But if you got a strong case that a big company is infringing your patent portfolio, you can go to a litigation law firm, go to a litigation funder and get funding for this litigation.
It was in the news went to trial in Boston there was three weeks of trial. They settled right before closing arguments. And so it does happen and it is now possible even for an individual or a small company to engage in that game of Kings against the biggest companies.
Because they are relatively expensive, I would never recommend that a company just patent everything that it develops. Some things are best kept for copyright protection or trade secret protection. But where a patent is best is when you've developed a new algorithm in AI, it might be a way of training a model, for example, or a new application like a new kind of a chat bot in the case of AI.
Because otherwise, if it's easy to copy, once people see how it works . Then they'll just copy it right. And compete with you and you'll have put all that investment in and won't be able to recoup it. And the patent can protect you against that. And lemme just say a couple things about a patent that are more powerful than a trade secret or copyright.
Mike Stohler: Yeah, that makes sense. Cause I might somewhere in Arizona, I might just create something. I have no idea if someone in New Jersey did the exact same thing, unless I hire a bunch of people to look it up, things like that, but I may just be all excited and I may be, have been working on it for 10 years.
I say, "Why couldn't you just use the model from OpenAI off the ChatGPT or something?" What was it that couldn't be done using existing technology that caused you to try to create this new thing? And if there's a really good answer to that, then they might have something patentable. And then I say, "What was difficult or challenging about inventing, creating this thing that you've got, was there some challenge you had to overcome?" And if they say, "Oh yeah. And we came up with an idea originally and it did not work. And then we investigated it and we went back to the drawing board and we came up with a different approach and we tried that and that didn't work.
Mike Stohler: Yeah, I know a lot of entrepreneurs started something because it's, man, I wish I could do this. Why can't I do this? And those people with those type of brains, they create it. Me, I just keep wishing that I could do something. That's why there are Elon Musk and normal people like me.
One of the reasons is that there's so much competition from their peers. So many other startups trying to tackle the same challenges. Agent based systems is the big one right now. Everyone's trying to create the best, biggest, most successful agent-based system. And there might be one big approach that surfaces as the right one, maybe there's going to be a bunch of different approaches, but when there's a lot of competition, it can be really valuable for a startup company to get a patent on their approach to things to help protect them against their competitors.
It can be training a model. It can be applications based on a model. It might be the model itself. It might be the products you design using AI. There's all different types of things you can patent. And then what are the uses? You can license, you can sell, you can use it to increase the value of your company for an acquisition or an IPO.
Make it sound like a real human being as far as like when I rewrite a paragraph using AI nobody talks like that. It's not even Shakespearean. I don't even know what it is, but I'm like going that it's so AI. So let's develop something, ladies and gentlemen that sounds like you and I that's my biggest thing when I'm writing things.
And I think the last thing I would say is that in the patent world, if you launch a product, if you release a demo, if you market, if you publish a paper, those can result in you forfeiting your patent rights. You can't wait forever to patent. It's ideal to file a patent application before you make things public.
Robert Plotkin: Yeah, patent pending is really valuable. So just what patent pending means is that you have filed a patent application and that it's pending at the patent office. It's waiting to be examined or it's in the process of being examined at the patent office.
Mike Stohler: All right, Robert, thank you so much for coming on The Richer Geek. Everybody, this concludes another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Take care