AI developer platform Hugging Face has settled a lawsuit against South Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing one of its patents.
According to documents filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, agreeing to dismiss the lawsuit “with prejudice.” Return to court.
“FriendliAI and Hugging Face are hereby dismissed without cost or fee to any party to this action,” the filing states. “The court shall retain jurisdiction over the parties' settlement agreement.”
Hugging Face did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.
In a lawsuit filed nearly two years ago, FriendliAI alleged that Brooklyn-based Hugging Face infringed its patents on “batch processing with iteration-level scheduling.” Founded in 2021, VC-backed FriendliAI, also based in Redwood City, California, primarily develops infrastructure solutions for AI.
FriendliAI says its patented technology, described in a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, improves the process of batch processing data fed into an AI system, allowing the system to process multiple requests at once. I claim that. The patent also covers an AI system that can send completed requests in a batch to a user or add new requests to a batch before the entire batch is processed.
FriendliAI claimed that the “server” component of Hugging Face's text generation inference tool uses a patented method to batch process incoming requests. FriendliAI was seeking compensatory damages, increased damages for “willfulness,” a court order restraining further infringement or awarding license fees, and attorney's fees and costs.
Hugging Face, which has raised a total of $235 million from backers including Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and Salesforce, is one of the world's largest repositories of AI tools and models. In addition to hosting models and tools, the company also does its own development and provides consulting services to help companies fine-tune, customize, and deploy AI.