The U.S. government confirms that OpenAI cannot apply for a “GPT” trademark patent

In a setback for OpenAI, the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) refused to allow a company run by Sam Altman to trademark the term GPT (Generative Pre-Training Transformer).

The Microsoft-backed company argued in its filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that GPT is not a “descriptive term” because consumers would not immediately understand the meaning of the underlying phrasing “generative pre-trained transformer.”

“The trademark examiner is not convinced. Internet evidence shows widespread and pervasive use of the abbreviation ‘GPT’ by the software industry with similar artificial intelligence technology that has question and answer capabilities based on pre-trained data sets,” U.S. Patent the trademark office wrote in its decision.

The fact that consumers may not know the basic meaning of the acronym “does not change the fact that relevant buyers are accustomed to recognizing that the term ‘GPT’ is often used in conjunction with software to identify a specific type of software with that artificial intelligence capability “Question and Answer Technology”.

As the use of generative AI surged last year, several AI companies added GPT to their product names. However, GPT became popular after OpenAI launched the AI ​​model ChatGPT, which answers in a human-like manner based on user prompts.

The company started calling its custom chatbot GPT and just released a text-to-video generation model called Sora. The report also said that thanks to its conquests in the field of artificial intelligence in the past 12 months, OpenAI has reached a deal that values ​​the artificial intelligence giant as high as $80 billion.

(This article has not been edited by News18 staff and is published by IANS, the associated news agency)