From FM synth patent to GPT: how a Yamaha DX7 royalty chain ends at AGI
andrew_n_carr · x · 2026-09-13
- The author traces a playful causal chain: John Chowning's 1967 FM synthesis discovery at Stanford → 1975 Yamaha licensing deal → DX7 and $25M+ royalties, proving the university tech-transfer model.
- That culture later birthed Google (PageRank licensed back, Stanford equity worth hundreds of millions), which bought DeepMind in 2014 and published the Transformer in 2017; OpenAI scaled GPT on it.
- A parallel hardware thread: FM synthesis put DSP on silicon, feeding the lineage that became GPUs (CUDA + AlexNet).
- It ends with a fictional Sept 2026 GPT-6 Astra trained on 100K Grace Blackwell GPUs — clearly a joke finale. Conclusion: a music patent funded Stanford's licensing machine, which funded the path to AGI.
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