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AI dossier

Artificial intelligence and intellectual property rights

For a long time, artificial intelligence only inspired people's imagination, but for some time now it has had an ever greater influence on our lives. Many of the devices we use today already contain forms of artificial intelligence. And it continues to develop so rapidly that this progress raises more and more questions - not least with regard to intellectual property rights.

On the occasion of the conference "Artificial intelligence - effects and challenges in the patent system" at the DPMA, we dedicate a dossier to this exciting topic. Our examiners in particular, who deal with this subject every day, will have their say.

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"Birth" of artificial intelligence as a field of research

The term "artificial intelligence" was coined 65 years ago: A group of young scientists met at Dartmouth College in Hanover (New Hampshire, USA) for a summer workshop. The initiator was John McCarthy (1927-2011), who used the term for perhaps the first time in his grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation for the "Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence".

„The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”

The Dartmouth Conference, which took place from June to August 1956, is considered the birth of artificial intelligence as an academic field. Among other things, it discussed neural networks, language programming and randomness and creativity. John McCarthy later became a professor at Stanford, received numerous awards such as the Turing Award and is himself the namesake of a prize for AI researchers.

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Bayern Innovativ, iStock.com/wigglestickk, iStock.com/phonlamaiphoto, iStock.com/phonlamaiphoto, iStock.com/AndreyPopov

Last updated: 20 March 2023