[kuschku]

> There's no way Google lets this leave their datacenters. Chip fabrication is a race to the bottom at this point. [1]

I’d hope someone somewhere steals the blueprints and posts all of them publicly online.

The whole point of patents was that companies would publish everything, but get 20 years of protection.

But by now, especially companies like Google don’t do so anymore – and everyone loses out.

EDIT: I’ll add the standard disclaimer: If you downvote, please comment why – so an actual discussion can appear, which usually is a lot more useful to everyone.

[vidarh]

There's little need for anyone to steal the blueprints. It's unlikely there's anything particularly "special" there other than identifying operations in Tensorflow that take long enough and are carried out often enough and are simple enough to be worth turning into an ASIC. If there's a market for it, there will be other people designing chips for it too.

[cm3]

Same misuse happens with copyright. Both were invented to foster publishing and not creating life-long monopolies. The life times of copyright and patents must be way shorter as well. Everyone builds on something that came before. It's impossible to build a better bike if you have to test drive on a street with patent mines.

Re EDIT: Downvotes must be comment-mandatory or not allowed otherwise.