Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

patentsgazette.uspto.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 209 posts

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#71

Post by watwut »

Ekaros wrote: post #45
GuB-42 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree, but Mistral is hardly a "rich player" in the current AI bubble. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and X are each valued at a trillion or more. Mistral is valued at $20B, 50x less. Even Deepseek is several times bigger than Mistral.

What a time we live in when 20 billion is considered poor... I would consider companies in sub million range to be poor and that is charitable already...

The big one believes themselves ready to rival "government power"

Btw, OpenAI words, not mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#72

Post by skeledrew »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #15
rvz wrote: post #10

This is just an RPC with JSON being passed around like a messaging system. So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI?

> So we are just vibe patenting rubbish and rebranding it with AI? "Patenting rubbish" is a description of pretty much all software patents since forever.

Patenting is itself rubbish.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#73

Post by moomin »

Ekaros wrote: post #18

Do software patents only exist for rich players to build a moat against poorer players? At this point with patents of this quality only reason for them to exist seems to be to cross-license them for extra revenue and to possibly block anyone too poor to fight for themselves...

The real truth is that's how Edison used them and they've been the primary use of patents since inception.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#74

Post by st_goliath »

Roark66 wrote: post #34

It is quite funny an EU company patenting a software feature that is basically unpatentable in EU in the US. Clearly this is an attempt to prevent similar patents from being weaponised against them in the US. No one cares about such stuff in Europe.

You may have heard about a little thing called MP3? Basically, Fraunhofer in Germany filed for (software) patents in the US. They made sure to wait some time for MP3 to become a thing before they started going after people and collect royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_...

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#76

Post by elil17 »

Ekaros wrote: post #18

Do software patents only exist for rich players to build a moat against poorer players? At this point with patents of this quality only reason for them to exist seems to be to cross-license them for extra revenue and to possibly block anyone too poor to fight for themselves...

Software patents are probably unenforceable in most cases, at least in the US and Europe, are essentially unenforceable. The European Patent Office, very sensibly, denies software patents.

The USPTO has a strange insistence on granting them even though they aren't legally valid. Therefore, if you have a lot of money, you might file a software patent for one of four reasons:

1) You hope that the US courts might one day change their minds and start enforcing software patents.

2) You hope that you might scare people in to giving you licensing fees even though you know the patent won't be enforced.

3) You want to prevent others from scaring you in to giving them licensing fees.

4) You want to get a patent because it's impressive/looks good on your resume.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#77

Post by robocat »

sarjann wrote: post #55

I do wonder if we need a charitable foundation that does software patents and makes them freely available just to stop cockroaches abusing patents. Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_patent_aggregation

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#78

Post by everforward »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #46
dummydummy1234 wrote: post #4

So anyone have prior art we can point to? Because no way is a rpc call novel.

Improvements in existing tech can be patented. An RPC call that an AI writes for itself and then executes is a novelty from prior art. Whether it’s non-obvious is up for debate but if it gets past the patent officer that debate happens via lawsuit

There is _some_ prior art here, though it’s not direct. This is very similar in concept to the joke Python extensions that replaced the global exception handler with one that invokes an LLM.

There are “workflows” that are very similar. Ie I can invoke a Python function that doesn’t exist and the exception gets handed off to an LLM to make it work by making that function exist.

This is functionally similar from what I can gather. Invoke a tool that doesn’t exist, we’ll make it exist for you.

It’ll probably get a patent issued, though, the patent office seems asleep at the wheel in the tech space at least.

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#79

Post by alerighi »

codedokode wrote: post #60
sarjann wrote: post #55

I do wonder if we need a charitable foundation that does software patents and makes them freely available just to stop cockroaches abusing patents. Another step (although governance would need to be super good for this). Would be for this charity to withold access to these patents from companies that decide to abuse stupid patents.

I think you do not need to register a patent, you can just publish the idea with a verifiable date, that could be considered as a "prior art". I would suggest to make a free website where anyone can publish any ideas although I do not understand how one can prove the publish date. And then the community could publish everything that might be potentially invented in near future to prevent others from getting a patent.…

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, Google? Probably not, so they will just shut you down, that is the sole reason for patents to exist, to preserve monopoly of big multinational companies.

And nowadays that patents are probably written and submitted not even by human but by AI, what stops a big tech with enough money for using a model to generate millions of trivial patent, submit them, and get them approved, for then another AI to search for their usage and sue you for using it?

Re: Mistral Patent for “Code implemented tool calls”

#80

Post by kristjansson »

anankaie wrote: post #75

This is called CodeAct ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01030 ) and is available in a number of frameworks. Patent was applied for 04.03.2026. langgraph-codeact _shipped_ this capability in February.

including Anthropic[0] and OAI[1]

[0]: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...

[1]: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-programm...

Post reply on HN