No 'GPT' Trademark For OpenAI

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has denied OpenAI's attempt to trademark 'GPT,' ruling that the term is 'merely descriptive' and therefore unable to be registered. From a report: The name, according to the USPTO, doesn't meet the standards to register for a trademark and the protections a 'TM' after the name affords. (Incidentally, they refused once back in October, and this is a 'FINAL' in all caps denial of the application.) As the denial document puts it: 'Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant's goods and services.'

OpenAI argued that it had popularized the term GPT, which stands in this case for 'generative pre-trained transformer,' describing the nature of the machine learning model. It's generative because it produces new (ish) material, pre-trained in that it is a large model trained centrally on a proprietary database, and transformer is the name of a particular method of building AIs (discovered by Google researchers in 2017) that allows for much larger models to be trained. But the patent office pointed out that GPT was already in use in numerous other contexts and by other companies in related ones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.