Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Oh wow :D Not commenting on the larger picture of why or why not Mistral might be doing that, but commenting on the idea itself: I plan to build my own harness soon, and one of its core tenants was, from the beginning, that it would parse every tool call the LLM attempts and executes them itself. I most cases, that would mean to delegate to one of the tools of the rust coreutils, or making a call to a LSP server.
My reasoning: - That way I will have maximum control over how the LLM can interact with the world (i.e. I can even narrow down which arguments I support/not support) - The monitoring story should be great as well, since every interaction with the outside world happens at one place only - I can add functionality as I go, and can understand how the harness changes and why it does what it does from the ground up
The biggest challenge I foresee is with the LLMs making tool calls and having them react to the results. I also wonder how far I will even get with this :D
Back to topic; "code implemented tool calls" is basically my "oh yeah my harness can do tool calls too" (and everything I need is implemented in one codebase, in... code)
by dev_dan_2 - 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 infringing on, so let's call it a day").by maeln
- EPO has Espacenet, which hasn't been mentioned yet. I find it the best of the free patent search tools, ymmv.by pbhjpbhj
- https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/ try thisby hmokiguess
- Believe it or not, but law offices make heavy use of https://patents.google.com/by samuelknight
- 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
by ramoz - Setting aside the tech, which looks like an asynchronous await across a network, the interesting question is why Mistral would patent this in the US.
Simple, because the patent is less about protecting an invention than doing business in the US.
The US is more hospitable to software patents than Europe. A US patent also gives Mistral something useful when dealing with companies that already hold large patent portfolios: defensive leverage, cross-licensing, and one more asset on the books to make it attractive to investors.
There's a certain absurdity to it, and the French have a history with absurd. A French open-weights company crosses the Atlantic to put a patent around a loop, not because the code is remarkable, but because the American market makes the loop a valuable asset, business-wise.
by mkovach - What's absurd about a French company doing business in the US taking advantage of US law?by seszett
- 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...by Ekaros
- Precisely the reason is to give breathing room for big players to invest in development of technology so they can capitalise exclusively for a periodby rusk
- The real truth is that's how Edison used them and they've been the primary use of patents since inception.by moomin
- Economically, it’s to avoid free-rider effects. This benefit largely seems alien to tech people because the industry inherently has other moats: network effects, data and code in a server instead of a product sold to consumers that competitors can easily disassemble and reverse engineer, etc.by rayiner
- In theory patents are also to protect smaller players (though not dirt poor), from getting their work ripped off by bigger players after demonstrating feasibility. The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents. Software patents pushes this model to logical extremes though. I run a small startup that trains models for medical devices and the only way to get any of the large players to care about implementing improvements you make (and not rip you off) seems to be to have some patent protection. They are mostly interested in the patents as assets to prevent their competitors from acquiring. In all honesty I'm not completely convinced on software patents either but we've had to adapt.by jablongo
- It builds corporate value. If you end up with a portfolio of patents that someone might want to acquire, you've just created a new market for your company. Individual software patents of common quality probably don't matter.
- That is why all patents exist. It's ridiculously time consuming and expensive to get a utility patent for anything. I invented something at my old company 5 years ago and the patent process is still ongoing, should hopefully get awarded this year. It costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and you need to actively litigate infringements if you want to keep it. 99% of patents exist just for legal bullying and the other 1% are actually novel, useful inventions.by jrflo
- Almost all these patents exist as a war chest and a deterrent against other companies. Everyone theoretically perpetually infringes on each other's obscure patents all the time, but there is a detente between the big players because they hold the gun to each other's heads. If you as a small guy enter the game, you're just shot.by bonoboTP
- 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.
by elil17 - It should be embarrassing and shameful to apply for such a trivial patent.by davemp
- “Claude, please review my repo for any work that could be novel enough to receive a patent. Be liberal in your definition of ‘novel’”by derektank
- Not the first time, not the last time in US patent history ...by tokarf
- Businesses know no shame, if applying for a trivial patent is useful, they will of course do so.
The real problem is patents which are trivial and/broad being granted.
by CodesInChaos - 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.
by anankaie - 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...
by kristjansson - Patent for the most basic pattern seen in literally all of software engineeringby nrabulinski
- Or it’s a patent for ”a method” of doing that, that is much more specific?by plufz
- Is “by an LLM” the new “on a computer” for lame patents?
- 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 lawsuitby jazzyjackson
- Seems that this is a patent application from March, so a challenge should still be possible. But it would have to come from a named entity afaik (not a lawyer).by c7b
- /r/ChatGPT (or HN) since about 4-6 months after ChatGPT was released?
Tool calls were immediately obvious, and everyone and their dog was doing their own hacky version of it (today we call it "harness engineering") for a good year before OpenAI wrapped it up in an API.
by TeMPOraL