Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Information Disclosure Statement
The information disclosure statements (IDS) submitted on January 9, 2024, November 10, 2025, and March 24, 2026, are in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claim 1, 7, 15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
The term “improvement” in claim 1, 7, 15 is a relative term which renders the claim indefinite. The term “improvement” is not defined by the claim, the specification does not provide a standard for ascertaining the requisite degree, and one of ordinary skill in the art would not be reasonably apprised of the scope of the invention.
Claims 2-6, 8-14, 16-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) as they are dependent on the above indefinite claims.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to an abstract
idea without significantly more. Below is a claim-by-claim analysis.
Claim 1, 7, 15
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 7 and 15 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claims recite:
selecting a selected prompt-output pair from the plurality of prompt-output pairs registered in the ledger, the selected prompt-output pair having a similarity above a threshold similarity to the first prompt
Selecting based on a generic threshold of similarity is an abstract idea that can be done in one’s head
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim are directed to insignificant extra-solution activity (“registering, in a ledger…”, “receiving a first prompt…”) or is a mere application of the judicial exception without significantly more (“causing, using a prompt portion of the selected prompt-output pair, the model to produce a second content, wherein the second content is an improvement over the first content”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 2, 10, 16
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 10 and 16 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim are directed to additional components of the insignificant extra-solution activity (“wherein a prompt-output pair in the plurality of prompt-output pairs further comprises metadata of the prompt-output pair”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 3, 11, 17
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 11 and 17 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim are directed to additional components of the insignificant extra-solution activity (“wherein the plurality of prompt-output pairs comprises a sequence of prompt-output pairs authored by a user”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 4, 12, 18
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 12 and 18 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on. Additionally, it cites:
determining that using the prompt portion of the selected prompt-output pair is authorized
A generic determination of authorization is an abstract idea that can be done in one’s head
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim is directed to additional components of the judicial exception application (“wherein causing the model to produce the second content is performed subsequent to…”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 5, 13, 19
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 13 and 19 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim is directed to additional components of the judicial exception application (“responsive to determining that no prompt-output pair from the plurality of prompt-output pairs registered in the ledger has a similarity above a threshold similarity to the first prompt, the model to produce a third content using the first prompt”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 6, 14, 20
Step 1: Recites a method (claim 1). Claims 14 and 20 cite one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, they are all directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim are directed to additional components of the insignificant extra-solution activity (“registering, in the ledger, a new prompt-output pair, the new prompt-output pair comprising the first prompt and the third content”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 8
Step 1: Cites one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, it is directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim is directed to just generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological (“wherein the stored program instructions are stored in a computer readable storage device in a data processing system, and wherein the stored program instructions are transferred over a network from a remote data processing system”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim 9
Step 1: Cites one or more computer readable storage media that are restricted from signals per se in the specification (see Paragraph 37). Therefore, it is directed to the statutory categories of invention.
Step 2A Prong 1: The claim recites the abstract idea it inherits from the claim it depends on.
Step 2A Prong 2: The judicial exception is not integrated into a practical application. The remaining limitations of the claim is directed to just generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological (“wherein the stored program instructions are downloaded in response to a request over a network to a remote data processing system for use in a computer readable storage device associated with the remote data processing system, further comprising: program instructions to meter use of the program instructions associated with the request; and program instructions to generate an invoice based on the metered use”)
Step 2B: The claim does not contain significantly more than the judicial exception. The analysis mirrors
the analysis of step 2A prong 2.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
(a)(2) the claimed invention was described in a patent issued under section 151, or in an application for patent published or deemed published under section 122(b), in which the patent or application, as the case may be, names another inventor and was effectively filed before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claims 1-3, 5-7, 10-11, 13-17, 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Fu et al. (“GPTCache: An Open-Source Semantic Cache for LLM Applications Enabling Faster Answers and Cost Savings”, 2023).
Regarding claim 1, Fu teaches a computer-implemented method (Abstract) comprising:
registering, in a ledger, a plurality of prompt-output pairs, each prompt-output pair in the plurality of prompt-output pairs comprising a prompt to a model and an output from the model, wherein the prompt comprises a text description of a content to be generated by the model, wherein the output comprises the content (Page 214, Column 2, Section 3.4 Cache Manager, Bullet One, “Cache storage: stores user requests and corresponding LLM responses”);
receiving a first prompt, the first prompt comprising a first text description of a first content to be generated by the model (Page 215, Column 2, Paragraph One of Section 4 Experiments, “To evaluate GPTCache, we randomly scrape some information from the webpage, and then let chatgpt produce a corresponding data.. then we created a dataset consisting of… sentence pairs”);
selecting a selected prompt-output pair from the plurality of prompt-output pairs registered in the ledger, the selected prompt-output pair having a similarity (Page 215, Column 1, Paragraph One of Section 3.5 Similarity Evaluator, “GPTCache retrieves the Top-K most similar answers from its cache and uses a similarity evaluation function to determine if the cached answer matches the input query.”) above a threshold similarity to the first prompt (Page 216, Column 1, Paragraph 4, “We found setting the similarity threshold of GPT Cache to 0.7…”)
causing, using a prompt portion of the selected prompt-output pair, the model to produce a second content (Page 215, Column 1, Section 3.6 Post-Processor, “It can either return the most similar response or adjust the response’s randomness based on the request’s temperature parameter”), wherein the second content is an improvement1 over the first content (Page 216, Column 2, Paragraph 1, ‘The initial experiments demonstrate that GPT Cache can effectively utilize semantic similarity to cache LLM query-response pairs and achieve significant speedups.”);
Regarding claim 2, Fu teaches the computer-implemented method as taught in claim 1, wherein a prompt-output pair in the plurality of prompt-output pairs further comprises metadata of the prompt-output pair (Page 214, Column 2, Paragraph 5, “Before a piece of data is stored, an id will be generated. The id2 and scalar data will be stored in cache storage…”)
Regarding claim 3, Fu teaches the computer-implemented method as taught in claim 1, wherein the plurality of prompt-output pairs comprises a sequence (Page 214, Column 2, Section 3.4 Cache Manager, Bullet Point 3, “…controls cache capacity and clears expired data according to LRU or FIFO policy…3 of prompt-output pairs authored by a user (Page 214, Column 2, Section 3.4 Cache Manager, “…stores user requests and corresponding LLM responses”)
Regarding claim 5, Fu teaches the computer-implemented method as taught in claim 1, further comprising:
causing, responsive to determining that no prompt-output pair from the plurality of prompt-output pairs registered in the ledger has a similarity above a threshold similarity to the first prompt, the model to produce a third content using the first prompt (Page 214, Column 1, Figure 14)
Regarding claim 6, Fu teaches the computer-implemented method as taught in claim 1, further comprising:
registering, in the ledger, a new prompt-output pair, the new prompt-output pair comprising the first prompt and the third content (Page 214, Column 1, Figure 15)
Claim 7 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 1 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 10 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 2 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 11 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 3 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 13 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 5 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 14 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 6 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 15 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 1 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 16 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 2 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 17 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 3 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 19 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 5 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 20 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 6 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 4, 12, 18 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over by Fu et al. (“GPTCache: An Open-Source Semantic Cache for LLM Applications Enabling Faster Answers and Cost Savings”, 2023), in view of M L et al. (“US 20220414536”).
Regarding claim 4, Fu teaches the computer-implemented method as taught in claim 1, wherein causing the model to produce the second content is performed… using the prompt portion of the selected prompt-output pair… (see claim 1 analysis).
Fu fails to teach the further limitations of the claim. However, M L teaches the production of a content performed subsequent to determining [it] is authorized (Figure 56).
Fu and M L are analogous to the invention because all are directed at machine learning systems and workflows. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified Fu to incorporate the teachings of M L, and incorporate an authorization module within the workflow. Doing so can improve the security of the service being provided (see Paragraph 3 of M L).
Claim 12 is a computer readable storage media claim corresponding to the method claim 4 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claim 18 is a system claim corresponding to the method claim 4 and is rejected for the same reasons as given in the rejection of that claim.
Claims 8-9 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over by Fu et al. (“GPTCache: An Open-Source Semantic Cache for LLM Applications Enabling Faster Answers and Cost Savings”, 2023), in view of Babula et al. (“US 6353445”, 2002).
Regarding claim 8, Fu teaches the computer program product as taught in claim 7. Fu fails to teach the further limitations of the claim. However, Babula teaches the stored program instructions are stored in a computer readable storage device in a data processing system, and wherein the stored program instructions are transferred over a network from a remote data processing system (Column 15, Lines 18-22, “In presently preferred configurations, the protocols may be stored locally at the particular diagnostic system, or may be available at the diagnostic system via a variety of transfer options7 or memory support devices, such as CD ROM storage discs.“).
Fu and Baluba are analogous to the invention because all are directed at systems with user interfaces that communicate with a server-side processor. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified Fu to incorporate the teachings of Baluba, and incorporate storage of the system on a computer readable device that can be transferred over a network. Doing so improves efficiency in the maintenance of the system (see Column 1, Lines 57-65 of Babula).
Regarding claim 9, Fu teaches the computer program product as taught in claim 7. Fu fails to teach the further limitations of the claim. However, Babula teaches the stored program instructions are stored in a computer readable storage device in a server data processing system, and wherein the stored program instructions are downloaded in response to a request over a network to a remote data processing system for use in a computer readable storage device associated with the remote data processing system (see claim 8 analysis), further comprising: program instructions to meter use of the program instructions associated with the request; and program instructions to generate an invoice based on the metered use (Column 3, Lines 14-19, “FIG. 15 is a flow chart illustrating exemplary logic for verifying and controlling financial and management arrangements between the service facility and the diagnostic systems, such as licensing arrangements, subscription arrangements, pay-per-use arrangements, and so forth”)
Fu and Baluba are analogous to the invention because all are directed at systems with user interfaces that communicate with a server-side processor. Therefore, it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the invention to have modified Fu to incorporate the teachings of Baluba, and incorporate metered use arrangement. Doing so adds a verification step that prevents tampering of system (see Column 21, Lines 24-34 of Babula).
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to MATTHEWOS MESFIN whose telephone number is (571)270-0782. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 8am-5pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Cesar Paula, can be reached at (571) 272-4128. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/MATTHEWOS MESFIN/Examiner, Art Unit 2145
/CHAU T NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2145
1 Improvement can be interpreted as more efficient content generation, as per the specification
2 ID is a form of metadata
3 LRU and FIFO policy insinuates that user requests and responses and separated sequentially in time
4 A cache miss requires a similarity threshold not being reached, as shown in claim 1 analysis
5 Indicated by “write back” in the figure
6 504, “..to determine whether to authorize the first operation”, content produced in 506
7 “Moreover, transfer of files and data as described below may be performed via any suitable protocol, such as a file transfer protocol (FTP) or other network protocol”, Column 8, Lines 44-46
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