Thank you for the great response. Yes, I can definitely see how mechanical or physics based patents would be beyond the AI's remit at the moment. As someone who is considering going for a software patent sometime in the near future I was pretty disheartened by the patent process - both submitting the patent (the expense can be up to $500k I was told) and also defending the patent from larger companies seemed impossible. Perhaps an AI can start with easily understandable patents like software, or primarily word- or keyword based patents, and go from there to an ML approach for physics and such.