ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 11 -- United States Patent no. 12,547,659, issued on Feb. 10, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).

"Query image generation in search systems using generative artificial intelligence (AI)" was invented by Fei Jia (Kirkland, Wash.), Rory Jesse Shevin (San Francisco), Manmeet Singh (Santa Clara, Calif.), Tejaswi Tenneti (San Carlos, Calif.), Lee Cohn (Chicago), Jacob Jensen (Metuchen, N.J.) and Esther Vasiete Allas (New York).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An online system performs an inference task in conjunction with the model serving system and/or interface system to generate relevant product images for query auto-completion and query suggestion to help users b...