Hugging Face, the AI developer platform, has settled a lawsuit against Korean AI startup FriendliAI, which had accused Hugging Face of infringing on one of its patents.
Per a filing on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware, FriendliAI reached a “confidential agreement” with Hugging Face on January 8, and has agreed to dismiss its suit “with prejudice,” meaning it can’t be brought back to court.
“FriendliAI and Hugging Face hereby stipulate to dismissal … without costs and fees to any party of this case,” reads the filing. “The court shall retain jurisdiction over the parties’ settlement agreement.”
Hugging Face hadn’t responded to a request for comment at press time.
In the suit, filed nearly two years ago, FriendliAI alleged that Brooklyn-based Hugging Face violated its patent on “batching with iteration-level scheduling.” VC-backed FriendliAI, which also has an office in Redwood City, California, was founded in 2021, and primarily develops infrastructure solutions for AI.
FriendliAI claims that its patented technology, described in an application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, improves the process of batching data fed into an AI system to allow the system to process multiple requests at once. The patent also covers AI systems that allow finished requests from within a batch to be sent to a user, and new requests to be added to a batch before the full batch has been processed.
FriendliAI claimed that the “server” component of Hugging Face’s Text Generation Inference tool used its patented method to batch incoming requests. FriendliAI was seeking compensatory damages, enhanced damages for “willfulness,” a court order blocking further infringement or awarding a licensing fee, and attorneys’ 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 largest repositories of AI tools and models in the world. In addition to hosting models and tools, the company develops its own, and it offers consulting services to help enterprises fine-tune, customize, and deploy AI.
