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The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT”, ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. This is a blow to OpenAI’s branding, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing their own version of the ubiquitous chatbot.
chatgpt Certainly the most recognizable brand in AI at the moment, it is the most popular conversational model on the market and the one that has most clearly taken large language models from curiosity to global trend.
But according to the USPTO, the name does not meet the registration standards for a trademark and the protection of a “TM” after the name. (Incidentally, they were denied once in October, and this is a massive denial of the application.)
As the denial document says:
Registration is refused because the applied mark describes only a feature, function or characteristic of the applicant’s goods and services.
OpenAI argued that it popularized the term GPT, which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”, in this case describing the nature of machine learning models. It is productive because it produces new(ish) content, is pre-trained in that it is a large model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and is the name of a particular method of building Transformer AI (Google in 2017 Discovered by researchers) which allows to train very large models.
But the Patent Office pointed out that GPT was already in use in many other contexts and by other companies in related contexts. For example, Amazon has a list of what GPT is and how they use them. and many more
The patent side’s argument is that the GPT describes one aspect of the product. Like if you had a cereal called Crunchy O, and you tried to trademark “Crunchy.” In ChatGPT’s case, it’s a GPT type AI model – a concept OpenAI didn’t create, and it’s not the only one to offer – that you chat with. It may be recognizable, but it does not meet the requirements for trademarking.
It may be that the lack of a trademark will reduce OpenAI’s dominance over GPT-related terminology. You can expect things like “TalkGPT”, which have no relation, to appear in the App Store (in fact they already are there, and are innumerable) – and OpenAI to sue them for using their brand. does not make.
That said, OpenAI has by far the largest mindshare when someone says “GPT,” so although their legal protections are limited, they still retain the first-brander advantage. If anything they could double down on the GPT branding, the trademark, to make sure everyone knows OpenAI did it first (or close enough).
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