It may come as no surprise to many of you that it is not easy nor cheap to get a patent in America. While it may be true that the application fees themselves are very reasonable you really need a patent lawyer. Just to get started it can cost thousands of dollars, and it can take ages to actually get the patent. Basically unless you are already independently wealthy, or have studied patent law yourself it’s almost impossible.

This is where AI could make a huge difference. To be clear this is not a LLM like ChatGPT or Claude. It would need the ability to take actions over time and plan ahead. It would also need to solve problems involving mathmatics, physics, biology, and chemistry. I think of LLMs like an isolated language center of a brain. Where you would need other specialized types of AI that would interact during the process.

The patent office could work with tech companies first by getting the patents into a machine readable version, and providing ancillary information in the forms of texts that mentioned real life performance issues, or historical impact. This could include the relevant scientific breakthroughs that happened prior to the invention being developed.

This AI could be trained to spot problems with the patent like if it violates known laws of physics, or would be highly hazardous if used as intended. It could also offer solutions to the problems that exist with the machine/process. The ultimate goal would be something where a 10 year old can work with an AI to get a patent over time. In the process of this that hypothetical 10 year old would have a very patient teacher, and if it can actually create novel, useful, and innovative inventions then I think that would be solid evidence for a sort of Artifical General Intelligence. So this could be a potential benchmark to measure AI with. How close can it get you to getting a patent?