Hugging Face reaches settlement with AI startup FriendliAI, ending patent infringement lawsuit

Hugging Face, a well-known artificial intelligence development platform, recently reached a settlement with South Korean AI startup FriendliAI, ending a nearly two-year patent infringement lawsuit. FriendliAI had accused Hugging Face of infringing its patent on "iteration-level scheduling batch processing" technology. The two parties confirmed in documents in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Delaware that they had reached a "confidentiality agreement" on January 8 and agreed Withdrawal of suit.

According to court documents, FriendliAI and Hugging Face both agreed not to pursue any fees and expenses in the case, meaning the case cannot be filed again. Although Hugging Face has not yet responded to a request for comment, both parties appear to be able to continue their respective business operations following the settlement.

Founded in 2021, FriendliAI is mainly dedicated to developing AI infrastructure solutions and has an office in Redwood City, California. The company claims that its patented technology can significantly improve the data batching process, allowing AI systems to handle multiple requests simultaneously. Specifically, this technology not only allows completed requests within a batch to be returned to the user immediately, but also allows new requests to be added to the batch before the entire batch is processed.

In the lawsuit, FriendliAI alleged that the "server" component of Hugging Face's text generation reasoning tool used its patented method, resulting in infringement of its technology. FriendliAI seeks damages, aggravated damages for "willful infringement," and is seeking a court order preventing further infringement or requiring payment of license fees, attorneys' fees and litigation costs.

As one of the world's largest AI tools and model libraries, Hugging Face has received investments from Google, Amazon, NVIDIA, Intel and Salesforce, with a total financing amount of US$235 million. The company not only provides various models and tools, but also actively develops its own AI technology and provides consulting services to enterprises to help them optimize, customize and deploy artificial intelligence.

In the fiercely competitive AI field, resolving patent disputes is the key for companies to maintain innovation and development. The settlement between Hugging Face and FriendliAI provides both parties with better development space and will continue to promote their respective business progress in the future.