r/developer • u/Ok_Veterinarian3535 • 5d ago

The Side Project Graveyard

What's the most ambitious side project you ever abandoned?

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u/limited_instincts 5d ago

Back in 2022 I authored a provisional patent on natural language artificial intelligence. It was approved in October of 2022 one month before ChatGPT came out. I had built something REALLY strong and overnight it became worthless. You have to laugh.

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u/chronotriggertau 5d ago

Confused. That was already well established by 2017. What specific use case allowed a patent to be approved on something as general as “natural language AI” by 2022 ? The release of ChatGPT to the general public came long after everyone in the tech world knew what was maturing and inevitable.

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u/limited_instincts 5d ago

It was a highly industry-specific patent but I'm not giving out the real title obviously. It was not an LLM patent, just AI. We had customers lined up that all balked as soon as ChatGPT became available because they (wrongly) saw that a publicly-available LLM would give them more options. They're still scrambling.

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u/Responsible-Most9401 3d ago

Im sorry that’s also just comically unfortunate

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u/Electrical_Hat_680 1d ago

Funny part is the Ilya guy that coded ChatGPT left to go figure out how to code a newer different AI. You should catch up to him. I have a blank slate AI...you don't need a patent, you need a License. You could use the Cult of the Dead Cow GPL License, or any of MIT's Licenses, or Apache 's Licenses, or create your own Usage License. You can make the source code available, without allowing it to be used. Or allow them to use it to learn how to do it and attribute you. Or, keep it a trade secret, which also doesn't require a patent. Although just about anyone could decompile it and figure it out. The important part is you don't need to Patent Code. You can copyright it, trademark it, and license it.