The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected OpenAI’s attempt to trademark GPT, ruling that the term was merely descriptive and therefore unregisterable.
OpenAI has the option to appeal this decision to the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board within three months. However, if the ruling stands, it would prevent the company from defending the exclusive use of these phrases and lead to their widespread adoption as common terms across the industry.
The trademark review attorney stated:
Internet evidence shows that the word “CHAT” means “simultaneous exchange of words over a computer network.” Additionally, evidence on record shows that “GPT” is a widely used acronym for “generative pre-trained transformers,” which are neural network models that “give apps the ability to generate human-like text and content (images, music, and more) and answer questions in a conversational manner.” It also reveals what it means.
The patent office pointed out that GPT is already used in numerous other contexts and by other companies in related contexts. In summary, the patent side’s argument is that GPT describes an aspect of the product.
It is unknown whether this decision of the US Patent and Trademark Office will affect the dominance of OpenAI and ChatGPT in the market. However, OpenAI is the first company that comes to mind when someone says “GPT”, so it is not difficult to predict that the company will not experience major problems in this sense.
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