The US Patent Office issued its ruling

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected a patent application from OpenAI for the second time. Register “GPT” as your own trademark. In a recently published documentthe federal agency asserts that “GPT” is a “descriptive term only” that details a “feature or function” of an AI company’s products.

It's no secret that the term “GPT” gained notoriety after the launch of Chatbot AI in November 2022. However, as the USPTO says, it stands for “generative pre-trained transformer,” that is, a large language model that uses a transformer architecture that is also found in products developed by other companies In this sector.

OpenAI's battle to register GPT as a trademark

The US Patent and Trademark Office first rejected Sam Altman's application in the middle of last year, but the company's lawyers did not give up and argued that people were unlikely to find out. Technical meaning of GPT. The Patent Office responded that even if people don't know what the words mean, they often associate GPT with a specific type of technology.

But the federal agency has two other reasons to support its decision not to give the green light to register GPT as a trademark by OpenAI. First, they seek to reduce the possibility that the company will stifle competition. Second, they want to prevent them, if they are the trademark owner, from filing “expensive lawsuits” against other companies for trademark infringement.

In connection with the above, when a company has a trademark registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). You get a series of important benefits– Provides proof of ownership and right of use, and allows Use ® symbol To help deter attempts by other companies to use a trademark and, among other things, provide the right to sue alleged infringement in federal court.

If OpenAI eventually gets GPT registered as its own trademark, it could create a potential problem for many other companies that have recently added the term to their products and services. It should be noted that while many did this as a simple marketing strategy, some may actually push their proposals using technology based on GPT models.

Now, even though the Patent Office has announced its “final decision,” OpenAI could still play some final cards, from asking the agency to reconsider its decision to… Submit an appeal. We have to wait to find out what happens in the end. Meanwhile, the video creation model OpenAI introduced last week has a more commercial name: it's called Sora, which means sky in Japanese.

the pictures: Jonathan Kemper

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