The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected OpenAI's attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and cannot be registered. This is a blow to his OpenAI brand, but don't expect competitors to start releasing their own versions of the ubiquitous chatbot.
ChatGPT is certainly the best-known brand in AI today, the most popular conversation model on the market, and the model that most visibly took large-scale language models from curiosity to global trend. is.
However, according to the USPTO, this name does not meet the criteria for trademark registration and protection by the “TM” suffix. (Incidentally, they have rejected it once in October, which amounts to rejecting the application as “final” in all caps.)
The denial document states:
Registration will be refused because the applied trademark only describes the features, functions, and characteristics of the applicant's goods or services.
OpenAI claimed to have popularized the term GPT to describe the nature of machine learning models. GPT means “pre-trained generative transformer” in this case. This is generative because it generates new(ish) material that is pre-trained in that it is a large model intensively trained on its own database. Transformer is the name of a particular method of building AI (in 2017 he was discovered by Google researchers). You will be able to train much larger models.
However, the Patent Office pointed out that GPT is already used in many other contexts and by other companies in related fields. For example, Amazon has a list of what GPT is and how to use it.Many other
The patent's argument is that GPT describes one aspect of the product. For example, let's say you have a cereal called Crunchy O's and you want to trademark “Crunchy.” For ChatGPT, this is a GPT-type AI model that chats with you. This concept was not created by OpenAI, nor is it provided only by OpenAI. Although it may be recognizable, it does not meet the requirements for trademark registration.
This lack of trademarking could reduce OpenAI's advantage over GPT-related terms. You can expect something like “TalkGPT” to show up in the app store without any connection (in fact, they already exist, and there are a lot of them). OpenAI cannot sue app stores for using their brand.
That said, OpenAI has by far the highest mindshare when someone says “GPT”, so it retains its first brand advantage, albeit with limited legal protection. In fact, they might double down on GPT's branding so everyone knows OpenAI was the first (or close). Trademarks are a terrible thing.