HACKER Q&A
📣 maxtqw

Do AI startups even bother with patents anymore?


Hey HN, I've been talking to AI and health-tech founders lately, and something keeps coming up: patents feel like they were designed for a different world. By the time you spend $20k and wait 2–3 years, your startup has probably pivoted twice.

So I'm genuinely curious what people here are actually doing. Are you filing patents anyway? Keeping things as trade secrets? Publishing defensively? Or just not thinking about IP until there's funding on the table?

I threw together a really short survey (60 seconds, promise) to get some real data—no sales, just trying to understand what founders actually do: Form Link: https://forms.gle/8UAytkGNfge4GKrH8

If you'd rather just comment below, that's honestly just as helpful.

  👤 genve Accepted Answer ✓
As a founder building in the AI video space (Genve.ai), I've grappled with this exact question. Our conclusion? Speed and execution are the only real moats. In the time it takes to file a patent, the SOTA (state-of-the-art) models change twice. For us, instead of spending $20k on legal fees for a patent that might be obsolete in 18 months, we chose to invest that capital into our engineering—specifically developing our parallel multi-language translation engine. In AI, by the time someone tries to 'copy' your patented method, a new research paper or a model update has likely made that method inefficient anyway. We prefer keeping our specific lip-syncing logic as a trade secret while focusing on scaling the product as fast as possible.
👤 svcrunch
I generally don't waste time with patents. I think most patents in deep learning can be overturned by prior art.

My current approach to IP is trade secrets. If we publish, we are careful to avoid details that would make the techniques easy to productionize.