ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 3 -- United States Patent no. 12,567,031, issued on March 3, was assigned to Maplebear Inc. (San Francisco).
"Predictive inventory availability" was invented by Sharath Rao Karikurve (Berkeley, Calif.), Shishir Kumar Prasad (Fremont, Calif.) and Jeremy Stanley (Oakland, Calif.).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method for predicting inventory availability, involving receiving a delivery order including a plurality of items and a delivery location, and identifying a warehouse for picking the plurality of items. The method retrieves a machine-learned model that predicts a probability that an item is available at the warehouse. The machine-learned model is trained, using mac...