Topic

The Patents Behind AI & Machine Learning

From Hopfield networks in 1985 to reinforcement learning in 2019 — the IP that powers modern AI.

Artificial intelligence didn't appear overnight. The ideas powering today's ChatGPT, image recognition, and recommendation systems were patented decades ago — many by researchers who had no idea what they were building toward. John Hopfield's 1985 neural network patent predated the commercial internet. Early backpropagation training patents from the 1980s described mathematics that would take 30 years of hardware progress to make practical at scale. Today's large language models, self-driving cars, and protein-folding algorithms are direct descendants of this work. These are the foundational AI patents — what they actually cover, who filed them, and why they matter.