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Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

patentsgazette.uspto.gov

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Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#191

Post by ux266478 »

freejazz wrote: post #187
linuxhansl wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. And that was exactly my point. If an idea is just an idea that anyone can have under the shower, there is no value to society in granting a monopoly to that idea. There was no cost to said idea. In that case is better for society to grant a monopoly on a particular expression of that idea (an implementation). If that idea had cost (say) a billion dollars (like in some medical research or physical research), ther…

Are you saying Mistral didn't invest a lot of money in discovering the invention this patent covers? I'd bet they'd say otherwise. How is the patent office supposed to tell the difference? I don't think a "pay-to-play" system works. There's already trade secrets that allow corporations to invest lots of money in protecting things that aren't even inventions. You just seem like you're trying to figure which patents ar…

The "invention" was first published in 2024, by Chinese researchers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030

Beyond that, it's a trivial batching pattern. Any remotely competent systems engineer developing an agent would immediately reach for it, it's the most basic tool in the toolbox to deal with latency. If Mistral "invested a lot of money in discovering" this, man I'm in the wrong line of work.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#192

Post by ramoz »

hmokiguess wrote: post #14
maeln wrote: post #9

How is the US patent registry easy to search ? I would be curious to see the patent registration of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. One way or another, I do fully expect every of those companies to try to fill these kinds of "almost for sure invalid and overturnable" patent as a way to defend themselves from every other actor (the classic "Oh I infringed on your patent ? Well here are some of MY patent you are infrin…

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ try this

This is the official search by the way for anybody wondering. It mirrors the internal examiner tool.

search: "12670045".did

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#193

Post by ramoz »

keeda wrote: post #181

Regular PSA for patent-related discussions: what matters is the claims, so before commenting one should read those. Also this is a patent application, so it has not been examined yet. The claims at this point will always be over-broad, because that's just how patent prosecution works: the applicant (brazenly) tries to stake out as much "intellectual territory" as possible (because why not!) but the patent authorities…

This is not a patent application. This is granted. They applied in March and was fast-tracked & issued in June. This is a full grant.

You can see the claims here: https://ibb.co/k2mVVkFN

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#194

Post by ramoz »

Some confusion in this thread... this is not a patent application. This is a fully granted patent. Looks like they fast-tracked it. Filed application in March, granted in June.

You can see the actual claims here: https://ibb.co/k2mVVkFN

You can find the full patent on the USPTO search site

https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/

search: "12670045".did

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#195

Post by speedgoose »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #171
speedgoose wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s old memories from the engineering school in Europe but I remember that a patent office is about collecting fees and documents, and won’t do any actual checks on the patents validities. Whether a patent is valid is tested in court.

Some countries don't examine patents for validity, some don't search prior art but leave it to the applicant. But plenty of countries do check for validity - including USA.

Interesting. They obviously don’t check very well if they do.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#196

Post by seanhunter »

Software is mathematics. The idea you can patent software is as ridiculous as patenting a particular number or the technique of Riemann integration or whatever. I have my name on a couple of software patents[1] and everything about the process is bullshit. When I read my first patent I couldn’t quite believe that this is an accepted legal process. The actual arguably novel part is one page surrounded by hundreds of pages of fiction pretending my thing was a machine to try to game the patent system. It is like the sovereign citizen BS but made real.

[1] … taken out by my employer etc.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#197

Post by keeda »

ramoz wrote: post #193
keeda wrote: post #181

Regular PSA for patent-related discussions: what matters is the claims, so before commenting one should read those. Also this is a patent application, so it has not been examined yet. The claims at this point will always be over-broad, because that's just how patent prosecution works: the applicant (brazenly) tries to stake out as much "intellectual territory" as possible (because why not!) but the patent authorities…

This is not a patent application. This is granted. They applied in March and was fast-tracked & issued in June. This is a full grant. You can see the claims here: https://ibb.co/k2mVVkFN

WTF! I just looked at the filing date of March 2026 and assumed this was still an application! I realize now that even for a patent application it had published too early, since they usually get published 18 months after filing.

Turns out it was fast-tracked, which is why it was issued in ~2 months. It does claim priority to an earlier filing so the invention date is indeed March 2006. Not a single claim was questioned or rejected, it went straight to grant!

Yeah, unless I'm misreading claim 1, it seems iffy. From a quick glance at the spec, maybe the novel part is that all tool calls are executed in the sandboxed code block, thus keeping the intermediate results from polluting the context. But I'm not sure if that's different from existing systems like LangChain.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#198

Post by inbx0 »

summarity wrote: post #129
linuxhansl wrote: post #99

Having my name on a bunch of software patents - and, yes, I tried to get my name off them, but was not allowed - I can fairly confidently say: There is not A single worthy software patent out there. You know, one that is "not obvious to someone skilled in the art" and that actually protects a monetary investment. Software patent are a scourge of the software industry. Patents are designed to protect costly research;…

I agree in general, but can think of at least one counterpoint: https://terathon.com/blog/decade-slug.html Actually novel implementation is protected, paid the author's bills, and was dedicated to the public domain recently - no massive corp involved.

I’m happy for the author, but I feel like that blog post kind of supports parent commenter’s argument. It sounds like Slug would’ve been created even if patents were not a thing. They had their own use case for it, and that usecase alone was enough for the R&D investment. So patents did not encourage innovation in this case. In e.g. medicine, not having patents could arguably mean that companies don’t do as much R&D.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#199

Post by jlokier »

freejazz wrote: post #189
jlokier wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you. So that you can continue building what you started in the first place, instead of being shut down while someone else take…

>Usually it's to defend against another company using a "blocking patent" by pursuing you for infringing their patent which is built upon the thing you patented, doing the next step which was always obvious to you. Would be pretty hard to sue someone for practicing a patent that cites that person in prior art who concurrently was inventing the same thing and would say how obvious it ones. You're going to tell me it's…

I've been in several patent lawyer meetings where we discussed blocking patent strategies and their mitigation when deciding what to patent, so I don't think it's made up.

Company A publishes invention 1, when they know inventions 2, 3, 4 follow naturally in their own roadmap but those things aren't obvious to other people yet. Invention 1 is just a stepping stone in company A's larger vision, and it's not useful by itself, but they can't publish (or patent) everything at once, it takes time to develop them. It's also not permitted to patent 4 inventions in one patent. There are time, expense and R&D factors.

Company B studies invention 1, realises invention 2 follows naturally (as does everyone who looks at invention 1), and company B patents invention 2 before anyone else.

They can do this because inventions 2, 3, 4 are not obvious to persons skilled in the art who haven't seen invention 1. They are only obvious to anyone who works with invention 1.

The standard is not "if you knew about invention 1, would 2 be an obvious next step", it's "would 2 be obvious with general industry knowledge alone".

When that happens company A is stuck, whether they patented invention 1 or just published and/or used it.

With their prior art, they can continue to use invention 1, even if they didn't patent it, but it's not much use by itself. They can't develop it further in the directions they'd had in mind all along. And sometimes company B's patent and company A's prior art will mean company A can continue to use invention 1 but nobody else can.

A defensive strategy is for company A to patent invention 1, even if they hate patents, just so that company B can't use invention 1 when they need it in invention 2. This doesn't stop company B from patenting invention 2 before company A, by the way. It just creates leverage for company A to persuade company B to license invention 2, instead of company A having to abandon its entire roadmap and switch to a different kind of product.

> I's only your right to exclude others from it that gives a patent any defense... it's all about exclusivity

Yes, but not all companies want to exclude. Some even want to share their work openly as they proceed. But even sharing openly and creating prior art as you go is not safe.

The natural line of development they have mapped out can be shut down by others seeing the way ahead and blocking it, which is a strategy, as I said, that I have seen discussed in real patent lawyer meetings.

For those companies, "what is the point of a patent if not to enforce the right of exclusivity it grants" -> the point is not to enforce exclusivity over anyone, because they don't want to. It's to use the granted rights as defensive leverage so they can continue developing, publishing and using their own work.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#200

Post by alerighi »

codedokode wrote: post #100
alerighi wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that it doesn't work as such. We all know that Meucci invented the telephone but Bell patented it. The patent office rarely care about it, they register whatever you want, and then lawyers of companies can sue you for using it without permission. Of course you can fight it in court and affirm it's prior art, if you have enough money to pay your lawyer, and do you have more money than OpenAI, Meta, Goog…

> what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent It requires a yearly payment and can get quite expensive [1]. There are application, examination, issuing and publishing fees for each patent. In contrast, publishing ideas online is free. [1] https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/fees-and-paymen...

For a big tech the publishing fees are nothing in comparison to what they can revenue on patents. Let's say that they AI generate 1000 patents and let's say the cost is 1000$ for each one, it's sufficient that only 1 of them are usable in a court case to sue a company for millions to make it worth it.

Publishing ideas online doesn't really matter, a big company can sue you and you have already lost, because you don't have the money to pay lawyers to defend you, even if you are in right.

There is no justice in our system, unfortunately who owns the money just rules. We don't live in a democracy, we live in something that is not much different of medieval feudalism, possibly much worse indeed.

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