The US Patent and Trade Mark Office ("USPTO")
has denied OpenAI's application to register
"GPT" as a trade mark, on the basis that it is merely
descriptive of the goods and services specified by the mark applied
for.
OpenAI, the entity behind Chat GPT, had applied for
"GPT" for goods and services including (for example)
downloadable computer programs and downloadable computer
software for using language models and Software as a
service (Saas) services, namely, providing online non-downloadable
software for using language models. The full specification is
available here.
GPT stands for "generative pre-trained transformer",
which is the type of large language model framework on which
ChatGPT is (and numerous other generative AI models are) based. The
finding, therefore, that "GPT" is descriptive of software
relating to language models is not especially surprising. That
said, the USPTO made two particularly interesting findings.
