OpenAI Unsuccessful At Speeding Up Its Attempt To Trademark ‘GPT’

It appears the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) isn’t too keen on limiting the number of artificial intelligence (AI) systems that take on ‘GPT’ as part of a moniker, as OpenAI has failed in its appeal to trademark the popular term.

According to TechCrunch, the creators of the popular ChatGPT software first applied to authorities in December last year to have the three-letter phrase—which actually stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”—trademarked.

Then last month, possibly as more competitors, including the likes of Google’s Bard and Elon Musk’s rumored TruthGPT, entered the picture, the company petitioned the USPTO to speed up the process.

This petition was recently dismissed, sending OpenAI to the back of the long line of companies awaiting trademarks. Jefferson Scher, Chair of Carr & Ferrell’s Trademark Practice Group, told the publication that the entire process could take another five months.

However, the company could expect good news when the time eventually comes, as Scher is confident that the USPTO will grant OpenAI the trademark despite the ‘T’ in ‘GPT’, meaning “transformer”—the name of a neural network Google unveiled all the way back in 2017.

There’s no doubt many will question if ‘GPT’, a descriptive acronym by nature, should even be allowed to be trademarked, but there’s precedent for the move. IBM—or International Business Machines—is an example of such a name being granted the status.

Will the term ‘GPT’be shared among all AI machines involved in the technology, or will OpenAI be able to claim a monopoly on the acronym that has entered mainstream consciousness? You might soon find out.

[via Gizmodo and TechCrunch, cover image via Sidney De Almeida | Dreamstime.com]