THE BIG STORY

A Setback for Artificial Intelligence Inventorship

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge by computer scientist Stephen Thaler to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's refusal to issue patents for inventions his artificial intelligence system created, Reuters reports.

Thaler had appealed a lower court's ruling that patents can be issued only to human inventors and that his AI system could not be considered the legal creator of two inventions he has said it generated.

But the idea of AI inventorship isn't going away. The USPTO on Tuesday held the first of two "listening sessions" on whether its rules governing who can patent an invention need to change to accommodate innovations made with the help of AI.

Any changes to inventorship rules would trigger a chain reaction in the American innovation landscape, Politico’s Digital Future Daily reports. For instance, ideas hatched by a generative AI model could belong in part to the AI model itself or to its creators, setting up a more complex web of intellectual property "ownership" in the future.

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MOBILE

Behind Apple's Smartphone Dominance

Apple’s seemingly inexorable takeover of the U.S. smartphone market—in June 2022, its share of cellphones in use nationwide crossed the 50 percent mark for the first time—has been driven by several factors, the Wall Street Journal reports. One not often recognized: Apple’s commitment to supporting old iPhones has allowed it to capture a part of the market once cornered by less-expensive Android devices.

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CODE

A Unicorn That Mixes AI, Software Development

Replit, the fast-growing service that combines artificial intelligence with software development, has closed a $97.4 million fundraising round that valued the startup at $1.2 billion, Semafor reports. Its user base has grown to 22.5 million developers, but Replit faces tough competition—like OpenAI, which powers GitHub’s “Copilot” software development tool.

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MEDIA

BuzzFeed News: A Demise Foretold

BuzzFeed's decision to shutter its award-winning news division should not have come as a surprise. The warning light has been on at BuzzFeed—and the rest of the digital media industry—for quite some time, writes Vox columnist Peter Kafka. Once worth $1.6 billion, BuzzFeed’s market value is now down to $100 million.

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SPONSORED

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QUICK HITS

• A hit track by fake Drake and The Weeknd is just the beginning. A flood of AI-generated content could soon hit streaming platforms, competing with real musicians and their compositions for the attention of listeners' ears.
• Even WhatsApp fans have been frustrated by the app's lack of cross-device messaging. Now, it is rolling out the ability to send and receive synced messages across multiple devices.
• The “hub and spoke” telestroke treatment network that remotely connects a far-flung group of hospitals to the University of Rochester's Strong Memorial Hospital might be the most extensive of its type in the state. Launched in 2018, its development has been spurred by the pandemic.

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QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"The next Silicon Valley … will not be south of San Francisco, it will be south of Beijing."

‍—Marco Santori, chief legal officer for the crypto exchange Kraken
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