Mistral Patent for "Code implemented tool calls"

I recently learned [0] that the USPTO makes it money from patents, its not government funded. Not only that but checking patents loses them net money while maintenance fees are the real cash cow.

The whole system is similar to the revenue model of a shitty journal that just publishes whatever research as long as the author pays. Except the office doesn't even need to care about their reputation in granting dubious patents because they have legal backing.

[0] It was a comment on hacker news, that I checked.

Fraunhofer is a research institution. They didn't really do licencing, that's why they never went after anyone.

Then Thomson joined the venture (wouldn't you know it, French!) and the fun with litigation got started

Not trying to protect Frauenhofer there at all, if they didn't smell opportunity they wouldn't have teamed up with Thomson after all... But I think the trend is very clear. Germans are generally a lot worse at the litigation game then the french. Historically that makes sense, but it's definitely surprising that it still holds true in modern times

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.

Or an Inter Partes Review!

It’s one of those kinds of patents i assume I’m violating every 100 lines of code I write.

I only have a rudimentary understanding of how neural networks work, but I wonder if rather than “understanding” what “novel” really means to humans, an LLM would be most likely to agree that something was novel based on having seen that specifically referred to as novel in its training data.

So that if you give it an example of something that already exists, but which was very recently invented at the point in time when the LLM was trained, and you ask “is this a novel idea?” that because it had several sources in its training data describing that idea as novel, it would say “yes that’s a novel idea”. Whereas what we really meant was to ask it if someone else had already thought of this thing prior to us right now in this later moment.

And then on the other hand, even if something was “novel” at the point in time when the LLM was trained, perhaps we would fare better to ask it “has anyone thought of this?” rather than asking if the idea is “novel”? And that even though it considers the idea novel in a way it would also be able to say that yes this has already been thought of.

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?

> It reminds me of those taxes on CD-R disks to support "Art associations" that were proposed before.

I find it funny when citizens of a country say things like this. Are you unaware that the Polish government brought in the same tax, 1-3%, on smartphones, laptops, desktop computers and SD cards from November this year? https://tvn24.pl/biznes/tech/nowa-oplata-od-smartfonow-table...

They're not just proposed, they are implemented in a lot of countries and France actually has the highest CD tax in the EU (and probably in the world but I haven't checked)