Patenting Artificial Intelligence At The European Patent Office

I. Introduction

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is one of the most exciting technologies of our time.  Although AI has been a field of research for over sixty years, it is only in recent years that it has begun to realise its potential. 

One factor in AI’s coming of age has been the development of new machine learning algorithms, through which a computer can learn to perform a particular task without being explicitly programmed.  The growth of machine learning algorithms has been fuelled by the availability of vast quantities of data from which those algorithms can learn, and ever more powerful computer hardware with which to process that data.  (In this article, the term “artificial intelligence” is used to refer to a broad range of technologies that includes machine learning algorithms.)