Now think about how often the patent system has stifled and stalled and delayed advancement for decades per innovation at a time.

Where would we be if patents never existed?

Who knows? If we’d never moved on from trade secrets to patents, we might be a hundred years behind.

To be fair, Google has a patent on the transformer architecture. Their page rank patent monopoly probably helped fund the R&D.

They also had a patent on map/reduce.