No Trademark for You!

Current Wall Street and Silicon Valley darling, and future business school failure case study OpenAI has been denied a trademark for the term GPT, because the term, which is an abbreviation for, "generative pre-trained transformer," is a generic term describing function, and as such, you don't get a trademark on it.

I would have thought that, with all of those very stable geniuses out there involved with the company, they would have understood this, but it appears that I was misinformed.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI’s attempt to trademark “GPT,” ruling that the term is “merely descriptive” and therefore unable to be registered. It’s a blow to OpenAI’s branding, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing their own version of the ubiquitous chatbot.

ChatGPT is certainly the most recognizable brand in AI right now, being the most popular conversational model on the market and the one that most visibly took large language models from curiosity to global trend.

But the name, according to the USPTO, doesn’t meet the standards to register for a trademark and the protections a “TM” after the name affords. (Incidentally, they refused once back in October, and this is a “FINAL” in all caps denial of the application.)

As the denial document puts it:

 Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant’s goods and services.

OpenAI argued that it had popularized the term GPT, which stands in this case for “generative pre-trained transformer,” describing the nature of the machine learning model. It’s generative because it produces new (ish) material, pre-trained in that it is a large model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and transformer is the name of a particular method of building AIs (discovered by Google researchers in 2017) that allows for much larger models to be trained.

Ah, yes.  The, "Rules don't apply to us, we are special," application.

I am pleasantly surprised that the USPTO called bullsh%$ on this.

This does not mean that OpenAI can't apply for a trademark on ChatGPT, but it won't prevent a competitor from creating TalkGPT, or ShoutGPT, or FartGPT.