- The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected OpenAI’s application to register the term GPT, saying it was too general to register.
- But those who use the technology know that GPT refers to general software, not just an OpenAI product.
OpenAI argues in its application, GPT is not a descriptive word, GPT is not a general term, consumers don’t the meaning of “understand” it immediately.
Reasons for refusal
The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) rejected OpenAI’s application to register the term GPT, saying the term GPT was too general to register and would prevent competitors from correctly describing their products as GPT.
In its Feb. 6 ruling, the PTO wrote that it doesn’t matter that consumers don’t know what GPT means – because those using the technology know that GPT refers to a generic piece of software, not just an OpenAI product.
Everybody has GPT
Since the rise of generative AI, many other AI services have added GPT to their product names. For example, there’s an AI detector startup called GPTZero. Other companies often refer to their underlying AI models as gpt, because that’s exactly what they are.
After the popularity of ChatGPT and its artificial intelligence model GPT-3(and later GPT-4), the term GPT became closely associated with OpenAI. When it opened ChatGPT to outside developers, the company also referred to its custom chatbot as gpt.Recently, though, OpenAI has given its other services different brand names. It recently released a text-to-video generation model called Sora.
Gizmodo points out that this isn’t the first time the U.S. has denied OpenAI’s trademark claims against GPT; The first will be in May 2023.The company could appeal again to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, again seeking to register the term “GPT” as a trademark.
