Patenting the AI pipeline: intellectual property for AI before standardisation

Over the past few years, and after decades as little more than a mathematical curiosity, useful industrial applications of AI have become commonplace. AI is now recognised as one of the primary drivers of computing development. In 2018, Canadians Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun – the'godfathers of AI' – received the Turing Award, computing's highest honour, for their foundational work on deep learning. The International Data Corporation forecasts that worldwide revenues for the AI market will grow to nearly $330 billion in 2021, and will exceed $550 billion by 2024 (IDC Semiannual AI Tracker, January 2021). Driven and enabled by the extraordinary growth of data globally, this surge in the AI industry has also spurred a flood of AI-related patenting.