Good. It's like a company in biomedicine trying to trademark "RNA". I dislike how OpenAI are trying to hijack a term to describe a kind of language model for their products and cringed when they introduced "GPTs" and "Making your own GPT". I see what you're trying to do, OpenAI...
So, after a quick glance here -- OpenAI argued that a consumer may not realize this and what GPT means, trying to use this as a defense for hijacking the term for use in their product portfolio, but the attorney thankfully didn't find the argument very convincing due to vast and established Internet evidence. He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.
I thought OpenAI was the first to develop and use the term GPT[1]. So maybe a more apt comparison than RNA would be PCR, which was a technique developed in a private lab and patented, even though it was published in scientific journals etc.
Doesn't matter either way who invented it. This is trademark, not patent.
If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (TM)"
They ALSO would have needed to use a different generic term to refer to the technique. For example, Velcro always says things like "Velcro-brand hook-and-loop," and ALWAYS uses a generic term to refer to hook-and-loop when talking across brands. It ONLY uses "Velcro(tm)" to talk about their product specifically. OpenAI started using GPT generically.
Publications like this one, if anything, undermine OpenAI's case since they're using the term generically.
The decision is correct. Trademark law is used precisely to prevent this sort of thing: OpenAI can have a generic term or a trademark. The law is set up precisely to prevent a company from building their brand value by retroactively trademarking a generic term once relying on a community to get it established.
To be more blunt: I use "GPT" generically because they encouraged me to do so. That should not contribute brand value to OpenAI GPT-3 or OpenAI GPT-4.
I always had the vague idea that probably Velcro was a trademark, but TIL that there's a company called Velcro too. I always thought Velcro was another DuPont product.
Unlikely. The Velcro trademark has been so far gone for decades that I doubt there is a single person on the planet that knows it's the name of a company and not a generic term for hook and loop fastener.
The next company you'll see in this position is probably Google. I think that verb will outlive Google Search.
More importantly, knowing and caring are two different things.
I know that Velcro/Kleenex/Google are specific brands, but I don't really care - the common usage is so far gone that there's rarely a reason to use hook & loop fastener/tissue paper/internet search instead.
Hell, for some people, "iPad" is a semi-generic term for a tablet. (Though I don't get that one, personally.)
> Hell, for some people, "iPad" is a semi-generic term for a tablet. (Though I don't get that one, personally.)
I remember when the NFL first started using Microsoft Surface tablets during the broadcast, except the commentators would keep referring to them as iPads. By the next week's broadcast, every single commentator had a giant "Microsoft Surface" branded tablet cover in front of them at the desk and overall the logos were plastered everywhere.
> If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (TM)"
While the (TM) is useful to alert people to your trademark claim, you are not required to use it to establish your trademark. Simply using a unique mark to identify your goods or services and being the first to do so is enough.
Because they didn't make any effort to treat this like a trade mark until after the term itself become generic to the public. If you want a trademark you need to be careful how you use it and how others use it to ensure it doesn't become a generic term. Once something is a generic term it is almost impossible to get it back. (it has been done: Xerox used to be the generic term people used for make a copy - but most of the effort was their competitors who for obvious reasons didn't want to use their competitors company name as a generic term)
If you want a trademark you need to defend it. That means you know the generic term and use that when required. That means when anyone uses your trademark in a generic way your lawyers are immediately sending letters. Check with a lawyer - there are a lot more details you have to get right.
Yeah, just because OpenAI has gotten away with using open source ideology for regulatory capture in the AI space, but that doesn't mean they can get away with it in the intellectual property space.
Non profit is a business structure not a designation meaning “no business acumen.” Many non profits are actually quite profitable and active businesses, but they have no beneficial owners, pay no dividends, etc, and often have some mission that’s in some way broadly beneficial. This exempts them from certain taxation and other benefits. But it absolutely doesn’t mean everything they do is done altruistically without material consideration and definitely doesn’t mean with no legal claims or recourse for protecting their works or identities.
Most people with the organizational skills to operate a complex enterprise demands a pretty significant compensation package. Even if you found someone to do it for considerably less once they’ve proven effective they would become highly sought after in the labor market and would be poached away leading to churn and turnover in roles that really benefit from stability over time. While it is likely there is someone who doesn’t mind living a life of austerity when capable securing of a much more comfortable lifestyle for them and their family, it can be really hard to find them and require a lot of churn in mishiring the talent and losing skilled talent due to inflicting non market bearing penury on them and their loved ones out of some weird morality not supported by the surrounding culture and society.
To their execs. It’s basically a meme in non-profit world how poorly everyone outside the C-suite gets paid and how the non-profit “mission” is weaponized against workers in salary negotiations.
I have a friend who with their CPA got a job at a non profit and they were worried they would pigeon hole into a specific industry and the concept of non profit worried them about their career. My advice to them was non profit does not mean “not profitable to you.” Depending on the non profit salaries can be greatly outsized and often perks are outstanding. All that excess cash goes somewhere and some non profits enjoy enormous margins and lucrative markets, but the accounting and related rules are specialized.
I'm sure the highly paid charity execs would say so. Trouble is, the charity space often suffers from a broken market feedback mechanism, where the people paying for the product are not the people consuming the product, and this can lead to a business structure that looks like a pure-play marketing machine hooked up to exec pockets with occasional leakage into a small amount of actual charity work.
"But the situation occurs in regular business too! Monopolies, oligopolies, etc happen when the market feedback mechanism breaks!"
Yeah, and we should go after those too. It's really astonishing the lengths to which people go to defend bad behavior.
For instance, the life line company (“help me I’ve fallen and can’t get up”) is (or was) organized as a non profit. They sold devices and services at a decent margin. Their excess revenues went back to employees in wages and perks. Executives and founders especially enjoyed extravagant life styles.
Many do so in order to maintain their integrity and reputation. For example, the name Wikipedia and the Wikipedia logo are registered trademarks.
In the case of fundrising and sponsorship, it assures to sponsors the legitimity of that campaign, because there is no conflict with other organisation or company using the same name.
And, non-profits doesn't mean they don't do things that they profit from, it just means they aren't trying to achieve profits for their owners. Endowments are non-profits, but they most certainly are making investments to achieve profits for the purpose of pushing that money into charitable vehicles.
For the same reason Wikipedia needs a trademark, or any successful open source project. To prevent grifters from hitching a ride off your word and muddying the water / confusing users of your service or product
RNA, PCR, and GPT all have precisely the same problem: the acronyms are purely technical.
- ribonucleic acid
- polymerase chain reaction
- generative pretrained transformer
You can't trademark the phrase "polymerase chain reaction" because there are many types of polymerase chain reactions, not just the ones used for copying DNA. [ETA: specifically I mean "copying DNA at commercial scale" i.e. the patented biochemical engineering techniques.] Likewise a generative neural network using pre-training with a transformer architecture is simply too generic to trademark "generative pretrained transformer." And if you can't trademark the phrase you can't trademark the acronym.
Is this actually true though? KFC is able to trademark their name and acronym (I believe their trademark is for the acronym officially), even though they’re selling Kentucky-style fried chicken?
IBM doesn't sell products called "international business machines" and hold a trademark on that product name, which would force competing manufacturers to call them "devices for transcontinental enterprise" etc. IBM is a business name, that's a different thing. More importantly, nobody calls computers "international business machines," that name reflects IBM's 19th-century origins, so having a trademark on "International Business Machines" has no impact on competing businesses.
A hypothetical 1930s computing company called Central Processor Units would have probably changed its name in the 1950s, since "CPU" wouldn't be trademarkable and their brand name wouldn't be worth very much. (A trademark on "CPU" would be needlessly detrimental to other computer manufacturers, or at best confusing, especially after the von Neumann architecture became the universal standard.) Of course in this alternate universe maybe CPUs would have been called something else, and maybe if IBM never existed we would be calling computers "business machines."
IANAL but I think it's a mistake to apply "If A then B" rules to this stuff and try to invalidate reasonable guidelines based on specific counterexamples. Judges need to consider how language is actually used in context by the people working in those areas. This is why the USPTO cited so many businesses and practitioners using GPT in a generic context.
The term 'GPT' was first used in the BERT paper to refer to Generic Pre-trained Transformers. [0]
> The fine-tuning approach, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (OpenAI GPT) (Radford et al., 2018), introduces minimal
task-specific parameters, and is trained on the downstream tasks by simply fine-tuning all pre-trained parameters.
Yes, but that paper that you link to doesn't ever call it GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers. It talks about training Transformers with Generative Pretraining, both of which are pre-existing concepts by this point.
I also looked on the OpenAI website in Sep 2018 and could find no reference to GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers, so I think OP might be right about BERT using it first.
That paper is using a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining" [0] and applying it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]). As far as I can see from a search, they don't even use the term GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers in that paper, and they don't in the accompanying blog post either [2]. A sibling [3] claims that the BERT paper in Oct 2018 was the first to use the term GPT to describe what OpenAI built, and that sounds reasonable since a cursory look through the Sep 2018 archive of openai.com turns up nothing.
Yeah, but my 2 year old Generative Potty-Trained Transformer needs an acronym too!
Seriously, like TLA domain names and other TLA acronyms, there just aren't enough to allow trademark. Imagine, if 5 letter LASER had been trademarked? Would that have also covered LASIK (Laser assisted sub-epithelial keratectomy)?
I believe the problem is that "Window System" is generic (as in X Window System, often referred to as X-Windows). That made it hard, but not impossible, for Microsoft to defend "Windows." After enough appeals, courts decided "Window" and "Windows" aren't the same thing.
There are plenty of generic names in software that refer to some element of the product.
Apple has a word processor called Pages, while Microsoft has one called Word. There were many applications before these that operated on pages and words.
If the trademark is “Microsoft Windows”, it’s just as specific as “Apple Pages”.
Microsoft’s own list (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... - PDF warning) - while it explicitly says it is non-exhaustive - doesn’t appear to claim ‘Word’ or any variant of it - only the word icons and logos. From your list it lists Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and Office 365, but not Microsoft Office.
Windows didn't start out as an OS. It started out as a windowing system for DOS.
That's the landscape all the trademark suits happened in.
Footnote: Windows 95/98/ME was still DOS + Windows bundled in one box. Windows XP was the first consumer operating system derived from Windows NT (which was in fact a proper operating system in its own right). Even Windows NT was trademark-iffy. It was a play on VMS (get it? If not, increment each letter).
> It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand. One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").
I can't figure out what this is referring to, though. Maybe you can do better.
No, Windows NT was first in the OS line. Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. There was no home / consumer / client version of Windows 2000. The versions were: Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter.
Windows XP was the first convergence version, where the home / consumer / client line transitioned to the NT codebase (with Windows Server 2003 still continuing the NT server market line, but now on a common codebase, and with some of the more workstation uses moving down to the XP line).
shrug And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too. Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came out, over the 95/98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the consumer brands.
At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI, Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores.
Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks, more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser by design, etc.
no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun?
i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for.
windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.
> no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun?
Yes. I had plenty of friends who did. Mostly from, very likely, similar companies like the ones you worked / consulted for when they upgraded. It turns out that despite the ludicrous prices new, last-generation workstations sold for a song, or were often just found in trash piles.
Corporate workstation markets aren't big into buying used. Supply and demand.
At the time, the gap between a modern Wintel and a previous-generation DEC Alpha (for compute) or IRIX (for 3D) was quite large, and not in Intel's favor. X + twm or similar was much more snappy than either NT or XP. And you had the full power of Unix.
Also: Multihead. Optical mice. Etc.
I had one particular a friend -- a student without more income than you'd expect of a student -- who had a whole roomful of older Suns, and probably a few Vaxes (which everyone hated).
From Microsoft's perspective, you're right, but for all intents and purposes, Windows 2000 Professional was a consumer operating system. It was better than 98 as a consumer OS and more functional than NT for everything else. Libraries and schools deployed it. The majority of gamers, enthusiasts, and tech people used it. From 2000-2002 it was practically the only Windows OS anyone used. Plenty of people continued to use it after XP's release, due to XP's various issues and (let's be honest) infantilizing theme.
The majority of gamers did not use it. I remember that transition, and the numerous compatibility issues that games specifically had on Win2K, since that was exactly the kind of software that was the most likely to play fast and loose with memory protection etc (also, nascent DRM in form of CD copy protection). I personally ran Win2K for several months before reverting for this reason, and so did most of my gamer friends.
I do recall the win2k-specific compatibility issues with games. However, everyone I knew was still using it. In reality I think it might have become more popular just before XP, as compatibility issues were worked out. XP adoption was very slow though.
This might be some kind of regional difference. I remember that WinXP adoption by people who were already on Win2K was blazing fast for the consumer market (colleges and businesses were a different story). But most consumers went straight Win98->XP, or in some cases 98->ME->XP.
>He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.
Maybe I'm just an ancient wreck of a computer nerd, but my first understanding of GPT was "Grand Partition Table" as a GNU joke/meme/misunderstanding for "GUID Partition Table", and to this day I can not redefine or re-remember it to whatever the hell OpenAI wants it to mean.
Yeah, ChatGPT is such a clinical name for a consumer facing app. Especially considering how easy AI stuff is to anthropomorphize. Google had the right idea with Bard and Gemini.
I love how terrible the name is from a branding perspective. It actually makes it feel more legit like a new tech rather than yet another wannabe assistant. And from what I can see, few have heard of Gemini, Bard, Cortana, Copilot, or Jeeves compared to ChatGPT, which has something of the charm of R2D2 or C3PO.
ChatGPT was never intended/expected by OpenAI to be a big deal in of itself. GPT-3 had been a big step up in capability from GPT-2, but of course wasn't getting any attention outside of the ML world since it wasn't something people could actually use. OpenAI built ChatGPT (says Altman) basically just to showcase GPT-3 since nobody else had bothered to do it. I don't think they were expecting the public to be so enthralled with it and actually find so many useful things to do with it.
Is it so terrible then? "GPT" has a nice ring to it, especially considering that it wasn't meant to become a household name - before ChatGPT blew up, only people who were interested in the AI field knew what GPT was at all.
Honestly, it feels a lot more straightforward to me, which is what I like - it's named after what it is, and isn't slathered in marketing grease, where every word is optimized to be the most average Joe-friendly. I'd take ChatGPT over Funky Happy Little Guy Arthur Intelli (get it, it's just like a real person) every day of the week.
OpenAI came up with the term Generative Pre-Training with the paper introducing what is now called GPT-1.
Not arguing that they should own a trademark for it but saying they are “hijacking” the term is disingenuous.
No, they took a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining"[0] and applied it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]) to get Generative Pretrained Transformers [2]. Even if you looked at the full name, that paper doesn't use GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers at all from what I can tell, this commenter [3] claims that the name was first used in the BERT paper.
It's a pretty dumb acronym though since it's doubly redundant.
The "T" is the only descriptive bit. The transformer is inherently a generative architecture - a sequence predictor/generator, so "generative" adds nothing to the description. All current neural net models are trained before use, so "pretrained" adds nothing either.
It's like calling a car an MPC - a mobile pre-assembled car.
Shilling for a multi billion dollar corporation makes you look like a fool and even more so when clearly they are on the wrong side of the argument here
As much as I don't really have an issue with what Musk did to Twitter mainly because I don't use it, X is a shitty name. Could've made a cool new name like Phaser or XLog or something.
I expect he's kind of buggered there. He likes the X name for more than just twitter so he won't want to lose control of it. At the same time twitter would be hard pressed to justify using a domain they don't control especially after the wework scandal (or a small part of it) about the same thing.
Sure, but twitter is not financialy stable and if it goes bankrupt then it's not Musk who decides what to do with a gifted x.com; it's used in a way that makes twitter the most value for the shareholders not the majority shareholeder. And as i said (with reguard to wework) if it's not gifted and with the knowledge of the abuses that a shareholder who is lending(and by lending i mean any convoluted contract that leaves Musk in control of it) a company a key asset can inflict on a company, then it's easy for minority shareholders to sue or even agencies to step in.
There are so many example of trademark abuse...
Like Monster Energy SLAPPing anyone who uses the word Monster [0: search for 'monster energy sues', there's too many to pick a single one].
Or King trying to SLAPP The Banner Saga for using the word Saga [1].
Or Bethesda SLAPPing Mojang for "Scrolls" [2].
I'm probably missing a ton more of these, but to be fair, it is quite easy to mistake these with copyrights issues, because it's usually the same companies that abuse that system as well.
Great. I hope they find a real name to their product, that would not be an acronym.
We can critic Google as much as we want, but at least it's a bit less weird to say "Hey Gemini" compared to "Hey GPT", when you know that GPT is actually something between an abstract concept and a code implementation.
In principle an acronym (initialism really) can be an original name, e.g. IBM, BMW. This is common. This trademark seems to have been denied because it's not "original" enough. It's too generic a term.
It's not so much that it's too generic, but that the term has been broadly used by pretty much everyone talking about transformer-based models for the past years at this point. The term has entered public domain before they even tried to register it.
AFAIK trademarks are granted for products. Microsoft was granted that trademark for software. If you opened a window shop and tried to trademark windows you'd fail since it is an existing term in that category. Similarly GPT is a term used in the filed of AI and thus would not be allowed to be trademarked in that category. I'm sure a window shop could trademark GPT for their line of windows.
Microsoft once sued a teenager for trademark infringement for having a website called MikeRoweSoft.com. The kid's name was Mike Rowe and he lost the website in a settlement.
In this example, the company is called Bayerische Motoren Werke AG. BMW is one of their trademarks.
See also how there's a company named 'Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG' with a brand called 'Porsche'. But nowadays that company is just a subsidiary of Volkswagen, and they could restructure to make the Porsche AG disappear, without doing any changes to the brand.
But they're not examples of mundane descriptions. BMW is much closer than Volkswagen is -- I doubt anyone has ever actually referred to a car as being "a car of the people" -- but "Bavarian motor works" is not a phrase that you'd expect anyone to use descriptively unless there was an appropriate referent, a set of car factories in Bavaria whose company affiliation was obscure or irrelevant. (Perhaps because there are many of them affiliated with different companies, but we're talking about things they have in common such as a demand for steel or technicians.)
Had that been the case, and had the phrase been in common use, it would have been impossible to trademark "Bavarian Motor Works" to refer to part of the Bavarian motor works. But reality is different.
I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to use an obscure academic acronym for customer facing products. I guess they didn't expect their "API demo" to blow up the way it did and are now stuck with the name.
Who cares if it's an "obscure academic acronym"? Nobody cares. "Laser" is an "obscure academic acronym", it didn't prevent it from catching on. In ChatGPT's case, you should ask around - people remember the name just fine.
What about all the people who mistakenly call it ChatGTP? (and yes I have heard this more than once in real life). I assume this is also the origin of the HN user with the same name.
ChatGPT is not really a customer facing product. It's a crude interface over an LLM,
directed more towards developers and tech enthusiasts who will use it to create customer facing products, rather than towards the general public. It only exploded in popularity because of its novelty, but it's far from being generally accessible or useful.
Countless non-techies at my work use ChatGPT. Several members of my family use ChatGPT, most of them haven’t done as much as write an Excel formula. My partner and her friends all use ChatGPT, none of them techies. South Park literally had an episode (over a year ago?) where the entire plot was about using ChatGPT to cheat at both performing in AND marking assessments, as well as responding to needy romantic partners. You are completely, incomprehensibly incorrect.
I'm not saying that it's not popular or not used by non-technical people. I'm saying that its utility as a general consumer product is limited and unclear. Most people don't have a need for a text generator or chatbot, but they would find LLMs useful if they're integrated into other products they already use.
Think of the difference between the Rabbit R1 device and ChatGPT. One is, or attempting to be, something that makes a concrete difference in people's lives. The other is a glorified tech demo trying to find a use case. I'm not vouching for the Rabbit R1 device, just pointing out the difference between a consumer product and ChatGPT.
Most of the gold rush and buzz about LLMs today is in delivering a consumer product, not about GPT-5 or whatever the smarter chatbot is.
The idea of narrowing the use cases is absolutely non-natural and probably comes from the marketing area for projects that are otherwise bad in most regards.
Most people don't have a need for a text generator or chatbot
I believe you never realized why you’d need it yourself.
I can also say from in-depth professional experience that OpenAI’s “GPT” models, both via ChatGPT and via the API, can be used to assess student performances in a way that correlates very highly with a human judge. So it’s not just people fooling themselves into thinking that ChatGPT is useful.
People I don't find technical in my circle used it before me and still use it. In my circle it was more correlated to younger age - early 20s, than to technical ability.
ChatGPT is still the only (free of cost? haven't tried anything paid) chat assistant things that allow me to have a conversation in that I push a button and then it keeps listening. I say something it replies and goes back to listening mode without me having to press a button.
I've been generating images with stable diffusion in the hopes of creating a snowboard design using my own personal computer and the results so far are actually incredible. And we're still in early days.
Setting up a text only LLM is just as trivial. And frankly better cause you can train it for yourself and tag out a model and save it.
Thankfully, finally some faith in the patent system. This was an asshole move to harass others from using the word GPT in their trade. Kind of like how Instagram did it with the word "gram".
If some company’s alcoholic beverage doesn’t get approved, you wouldn’t say “finally some faith in the firearms system” just because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives handles both.
Logically, legally and organizationally they are separate systems. There is zero indication for overlap between them to the degree that it would warrant more trust in the patent system because someone's trademark application failed.
They are. I got a Registered trademark for one of my companies (®, as opposed to ™).
It's a huge pain (and pretty much requires lawyers, but you can do it yourself, if you are a masochist), and, in retrospect, not worth it. I suspect that why most companies use ™.
As someone who is both a paid customer of ChatGPT Plus and the API (in other words, a loyal customer), I'm glad to see this.
While companies can and should do better than name everything CompanyGPT, this sends a clear message that OpenAI doesn't own the concept of GPTs, even if it's a meaningless string of letters to most people.
Good because GPT was a terrible brand. I don’t mean as in “oh no they use a term”. I mean as in its a very obscure term for most. There are way better names to come up with. And “GPTs” is even worse as a way to express “customizable prompts and knowledge files”.
I went a bit meta on this and supplied the trademark report to ChatGPT, prompting it to summarize. It did so as follows:
The US Trademark Office rejected the application, deeming "GPT" merely descriptive of the features, functions, or characteristics of OpenAI's goods and services. The decision was based on extensive evidence showing "GPT" is widely used in the industry to refer to a specific type of AI technology, making it not distinctive enough for trademark protection under the Trademark Act Section 2(e)(1). Additionally, OpenAI's application was partially refused for Class 09 due to unacceptable specimens, as they did not demonstrate the mark's use in commerce in a manner that allows for the downloading or purchasing of the software.
No, the primary reason given for rejection is that the term is merely descriptive—GPT just refers to a transformer that was trained with generative pre-training. The examining attorney gave a bunch of examples of GPT being used to describe a type of AI system.
So it's not that the trademark has been diluted (although the attorney included a warning that even if the trademarks weren't descriptive it's also become generic), the problem is that it would never have been an acceptable trademark because trademark law doesn't allow you to trademark a description of a product that would apply equally well to your competitors' products.
> Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant’s goods and services.
Apple is a brand name that contains no technical information, whereas GPT is a technical term describing what the software does. OpenAI cannot patent transformers or generative pretraining, so it makes no sense for them to be able to trademark "generative pre-trained transformer."
So a better analogy would be Apple trying to trademark Screen Time so that no other smartphone OS could name its usage-tracking feature "Screen Time" - you can't trademark a description of what the software does.
"App Store" would be my example, as they had a legal fight over that, initially getting the trademark then not being able to prevent Amazon using "Amazon Appstore".
"Are consumers likely to be confused?" is the way lawyers explained the positive case to me. An "Apple" computer isn't likely to be bought by accident to be used as an ingredient in a fruit salad, but a "Sorny" TV might well be bought instead of a "Sony" model.
They also follow this up with "you have to aggressively defend trademarks just in case".
Which is why Apple Corps and Apple Computer had several legal battles over the years, especially once Apple (the computer company) started selling music
Because trademarks apply to specific sectors, not everything. You can't make a computer and call your brand Apple. You can make Apple Bottoms jeans, and because the two are operating in completely separate industries, customers don't get confused.
But GPT is already generate enough in its sector, so...
In some ways it's closer to Apple (computer) performing a SLAPP. If the legal system were fair in magnitude of costs, then Apple couldn't get away with it.
Instead of looking at the outliers that exist in huge corporations, looking at arguments in small businesses that don't have unlimited budgets generally shows a more even system.
Leading up to ChatGPT, virtually no model innovation was needed. Just some minor tweaks to activation functions and the order in which operations were completed in the feedfoward layers. So they were essentially trying to trademark the innovation published openly in Attention is All You Need?
This is good the trademark failed. It might have been more of a defensive move rather than trying to lock up the term for OpenAI's exclusive use. Although, I'm sure they would have been happy if it succeeded.
Question for a lawyer, but in my experience it's common for companies to file trademarks with the expectation they'll lose. This creates a precedence for others trying to file similar trademarks and clears the way for the company to continue using the non-trademarked term without fear of future lawsuit.
GPT had previously been used as an acronym for market-research websites like Amazon MTurk (participants Get Paid To fill surverys) before the LLM craze so it does seem like a bad trademark.
I think Apple's trademark lawsuit against a.pl (Polish grocery site) [0] failed for that reason, so it seems good that the concept looks like it's limited to specific fields.
I guarantee you that over 99% of OpenAI’s paying user base do not give a hoot about this “open AI” thing. It literally doesn’t matter outside of people whining on Hacker News and Twitter. I’d eat my hat if it was the deciding factor for ONE person choosing whether or not to use an OpenAI product. If this is a big issue for you, you’re probably opposed to closed-source models in general.
Open sounds like a fancy computer word, and AI is….literally AI, two letters people are very excited about. I very much doubt that OpenAI has a branding problem.
It sounds like a meme name the moment you know how OpenAI started.
I use and pay for their products and I find them absolutely great. I'm obviously opposed to closed source models and knowledge for AI because I've seen how important was the GPT paper by Google. You're making judgments and assumptions and that is quite annoying.
I was rejected by the App Store a few months ago because I named my app {AppName}GPT for use of a "registered" trademark. I got through their review process with my first few versions, but on my third update they rejected. Ultimately, I decided on a name change and it's yielded better results for ASO anyways.
No need to trademark all 3 letter combinations, because all three letter acronyms have already been purchased by DNS squatters. It would be crazy to choose a name for a company or product for which you can't get the domain name.
I find it surprising how quickly we rush to pass judgment on OpenAI's actions without understanding the motivations behind their attempt to trademark. It's possible that they are seeking protection against others who might register the same, or it could be a measure to prevent customers from unknowingly sharing sensitive company data with a GPT indexer unrelated to OpenAI. If anyone has evidence of OpenAI acting in bad faith, please share it.
Given how they characterise GPTs in general as custom versions of chatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), I don't think it's a stretch to assume they're not being very benevolent in this trademark attempt. You should also be asking for evidence that they are acting in good faith, if you're interested in determining their actual motivations.
If they're worried about people confusing their service with others, shouldn't they then just choose a different name than the tech it's built on? I don't see MySQL or others being afraid of them being confused with other databases.
I don't think the debate here is about motivation - the concern is that in itself, regardless of the reasons, attempting to trademark a generic technical term is bad behaviour.
I go through most links submitted to this site and you'd be surprised just how much relevant or otherwise interesting stuff doesn't make the front page. You could quite easily start an alternative HN variant populated solely with items that don't make it.
This was an open and shut case and OpenAI was either delusional or just being arrogant in thinking they would get this trademark. The PTO is simply applying the law. You can’t trademark something in common use like this.
Consider the mess if they didn't attempt to get it, and a trademark troll (yes, they do exist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_troll ) was able to get the trademark and sued everyone.
Should OpenAI get a trademark for GPT? No. Should anyone else? No. How do you prevent someone else from trying to get the trademark for GPT? Try to get it yourself if you've got a word used with a product name.
At worst following this, you get denied - like OpenAI was for GPT. But this is better than the worst worst case where you don't try and someone else gets it and sues you for trademark infringement (and wins? forces you to rebrand?).
The best keyboard productivity I gained was remapping the CAPS key to do nothing in macOS. I’ve been considering remapping it to the `backtick key since I use that so much in Slack discussions and when writing documentation
I used to work with a good programmer who hunt and pecked using his index fingers. I thought it was funny, but it drove the vim guy in the office nuts.
So, after a quick glance here -- OpenAI argued that a consumer may not realize this and what GPT means, trying to use this as a defense for hijacking the term for use in their product portfolio, but the attorney thankfully didn't find the argument very convincing due to vast and established Internet evidence. He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.