Comment by OkayPhysicist
24 days ago
In the US, the patent office almost always grants patents as long as the correct process is followed. They don't really concern themselves with whether a patent could be successfully challenged, they just care about whether the the application is shaped like a patent. They leave it to the courts to invalidate all the bad patents they approve. It's pretty terrible: the very least they could do is ask a random dude in the relevant industry whether there's anything novel there at all, and they don't even do that.
This is not at all true, [non-final] rejections are very common. Not only for reasons relating to the the form of an application but also due to lack of novelty or inventiveness (35 USC 102, 103).
Then US industry players should give a mistral a call to shut this down before it can become a thing that can cause them issues!
The US industry players are unconcerned. Mistral wouldn't be stupid enough to use this patent against them, because they know damn well they'd lose, and then have their patent invalidated. No, more likely Mistral is planning on using this patent as a cudgel against small start-ups and open-weight models, who don't have the resources to fight back effectively. Which is good for Anthropic/"Open"AI.