The world’s first AI patent has been awarded by South Africa to the AI inventor, DABUS. The patent was officially issued on July 28 and it is reported in the July 2021 Patent Journal. The patent is for, “a food container based on fractal geometry.” This officially marks the onset of technological innovations in the world regarding the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This has opened new and optimistic avenues for tech enthusiasts, researchers, and scientists.
However, it is being said that the patent giving system is not very well-established and advanced in the country as it is in the more developed end of the world. Therefore, the value of this grant of the patent may not be as much as it appears to be. Nevertheless, it is still a patent and holds a significant amount of respect and hope for future endeavors in Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Acquiring the patent was not an easy task. In fact, it had been filed since September 2019. It took two years to finally pass the official permission to the inventor. The patent is now under the name of DABUS, “Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”, which is an artificial intelligence system developed by the physicist Stephen Thale. His work is being used by Professor Ryan Abbott and his team at the University of Surrey.
DABUS is basically a system that will create new, unique, and creative solutions for the problems at hand by brainstorming. The machine is also able to receive information from external sources. For example, data can be fed to the mechanism, and it will develop an understanding and learning of it. Afterward, it will generate creative solutions with consideration of the data that it was provided, and it has the ability to do it perfectly and fast.
The inventor had taken the technology to be patented in the UK as well where it was rejected because it did not fall under the UK Patents Act 1977. The European Patent Office, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and Australia’s Federal Court did not pass the patent either. However, this grant has now given hope to the inventor.