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Working Paper
Spreading Out Across Expanding Idea Space
Over nearly two centuries, U.S. inventions have become increasingly dissimilar: not just fewer head-to-head collisions between inventors, but growing distance between neighboring inventions. We document this secular decline in similarity using validated neural language models applied to the full text of claims in over 11 million U.S. patents (1836–2023), corroborated by a 98 percent decline in patent interference rates, a measure of independent simultaneous invention. Measuring this correctly requires validation, since different representations of the same patent text can yield opposite ...