[HN Gopher] OpenAI - Application for US trademark "GPT" has failed
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OpenAI - Application for US trademark "GPT" has failed
Author : vincent_s
Score : 561 points
Date : 2024-02-15 07:52 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tsdr.uspto.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (tsdr.uspto.gov)
| jadayesnaamsi wrote:
| Great. I hope they find a real name to their product, that would
| not be an acronym.
|
| We can critic Google as much as we want, but at least it's a bit
| less weird to say "Hey Gemini" compared to "Hey GPT", when you
| know that GPT is actually something between an abstract concept
| and a code implementation.
| HPsquared wrote:
| In principle an acronym (initialism really) can be an original
| name, e.g. IBM, BMW. This is common. This trademark seems to
| have been denied because it's not "original" enough. It's too
| generic a term.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Company name vs product name
| eru wrote:
| In this example, the company is called Bayerische Motoren
| Werke AG. BMW is one of their trademarks.
|
| See also how there's a company named 'Dr. Ing. h.c. F.
| Porsche AG' with a brand called 'Porsche'. But nowadays
| that company is just a subsidiary of Volkswagen, and they
| could restructure to make the Porsche AG disappear, without
| doing any changes to the brand.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Volkswagen
|
| Also, this is literally "people's car".
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| And BMW is literally "Bavarian motor works". It's fun to
| know, but so what?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Aren't M&M's a product name?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's not so much that it's too generic, but that the term has
| been broadly used by pretty much everyone talking about
| transformer-based models for the past years at this point.
| The term has entered public domain before they even tried to
| register it.
| tgv wrote:
| Weirdly enough, Microsoft did get a trademark on "Windows".
| Perhaps OpenAI was counting on a similar decision.
| hulitu wrote:
| They have money, you know ...
| Kbelicius wrote:
| AFAIK trademarks are granted for products. Microsoft was
| granted that trademark for software. If you opened a window
| shop and tried to trademark windows you'd fail since it is
| an existing term in that category. Similarly GPT is a term
| used in the filed of AI and thus would not be allowed to be
| trademarked in that category. I'm sure a window shop could
| trademark GPT for their line of windows.
| jbenjoseph wrote:
| This is called "descriptiveness", a very bad quality for
| a trademark application to have.
| bonton89 wrote:
| Microsoft once sued a teenager for trademark infringement
| for having a website called MikeRoweSoft.com. The kid's
| name was Mike Rowe and he lost the website in a settlement.
| kube-system wrote:
| That's because it is expensive for kids to defend
| lawsuits, not because a court agreed.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| Still redirects to microsoft.com
| keiferski wrote:
| The real question is whether _beemer_ is trademarked.
| vrighter wrote:
| to play devil's advocate for a second...
|
| referring to gpt as "hey gpt" is not really different than
| "computer" as used in at least one popular tv show.
| neya wrote:
| Thankfully, finally some faith in the patent system. This was an
| asshole move to harass others from using the word GPT in their
| trade. Kind of like how Instagram did it with the word "gram".
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| Trademarks are completely unrelated to patents.
| eru wrote:
| Or they should be. I think in the US they are handled by the
| same bureaucracy called 'United States Patent and Trademark
| Office'?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That doesn't make them part of 'the patent system', you
| could overhaul the patent system without ever touching on
| trademark law.
| eru wrote:
| Logically both systems are separate, yes. And some
| countries might even have separate bureaucracies for
| them.
|
| But the US has the same bureaucracy for both. And
| bureaucracies are leaky abstractions.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Logically, legally and organizationally they are separate
| systems. There is zero indication for overlap between
| them to the degree that it would warrant more trust in
| the patent system because someone's trademark application
| failed.
| biot wrote:
| If some company's alcoholic beverage doesn't get approved,
| you wouldn't say "finally some faith in the firearms
| system" just because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
| Firearms, and Explosives handles both.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| They are. I got a Registered trademark for one of my
| companies ((r), as opposed to (tm)).
|
| It's a _huge_ pain (and pretty much requires lawyers, but
| you _can_ do it yourself, if you are a masochist), and, in
| retrospect, not worth it. I suspect that why most companies
| use (tm).
| eru wrote:
| What extra benefits do you get?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Basically, the only real benefit, and that can be
| significant, is that it greatly strengthens your case, if
| going after copiers.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Well, yes, but in the US USPTO is responsible for both
| trademarks and patents.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| They are different but not completely unrelated either. They
| are both parts of _industrial property_.
| eru wrote:
| Did you mean intellectual property?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Nope, even though _industrial property_ is itself one of
| the two sides of intellectual property (the other being
| copyright).
| eru wrote:
| Thanks, I hadn't come across the term before.
|
| For other people who haven't, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_property
| vmfunction wrote:
| yeah, but in US, both are in the same office: USPTO (United
| States Patent and Trademark Office)
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| And another office handles tobacco and explosives. US
| administration is full of historical cruft. What's your
| point?
| jug wrote:
| Good. It's like a company in biomedicine trying to trademark
| "RNA". I dislike how OpenAI are trying to hijack a term to
| describe a kind of language model for their products and cringed
| when they introduced "GPTs" and "Making your own GPT". I see what
| you're trying to do, OpenAI...
|
| So, after a quick glance here -- OpenAI argued that a consumer
| may not realize this and what GPT means, trying to use this as a
| defense for hijacking the term for use in their product
| portfolio, but the attorney thankfully didn't find the argument
| very convincing due to vast and established Internet evidence. He
| also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't
| know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that
| it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology
| has already been established.
| larodi wrote:
| Next they try to copyright CHAT perhaps. Indeed very
| irritating.
| EGreg wrote:
| How did Microsoft trademark Windows? When computer windows
| existed?
| stavros wrote:
| Presumably because "windows" wasn't a term used to describe
| an OS. They didn't trademark "OS".
| blagie wrote:
| Windows didn't start out as an OS. It started out as a
| windowing system for DOS.
|
| That's the landscape all the trademark suits happened in.
|
| Footnote: Windows 95/98/ME was still DOS + Windows
| bundled in one box. Windows XP was the first consumer
| operating system derived from Windows NT (which was in
| fact a proper operating system in its own right). Even
| Windows NT was trademark-iffy. It was a play on VMS (get
| it? If not, increment each letter).
| zabzonk wrote:
| windows 2000 was first
| blagie wrote:
| No, Windows NT was first in the OS line. Windows 2000 was
| NT 5.0. There was no home / consumer / client version of
| Windows 2000. The versions were: Professional, Server,
| Advanced Server and Datacenter.
|
| Windows XP was the first convergence version, where the
| home / consumer / client line transitioned to the NT
| codebase (with Windows Server 2003 still continuing the
| NT server market line, but now on a common codebase, and
| with some of the more workstation uses moving down to the
| XP line).
| zabzonk wrote:
| i meant that 2k preceded xp. i had a copy of 2k
| professional on a couple of consumer sony vaios, bought
| in high-street stores i.e. consumer products.
| blagie wrote:
| _shrug_ And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too.
| Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came
| out, over the 95 /98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the
| consumer brands.
|
| At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and
| "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end
| consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI,
| Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of
| disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a
| $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of
| professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores.
|
| Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive
| multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks,
| more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser
| by design, etc.
| zabzonk wrote:
| no, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an
| SGI workstation? or a Sun?
|
| i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for
| me at ludicrous prices by the companies i
| worked/consulted for.
|
| windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on
| consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed
| into xp, which is my point about which came first.
| vehemenz wrote:
| From Microsoft's perspective, you're right, but for all
| intents and purposes, Windows 2000 Professional was a
| consumer operating system. It was better than 98 as a
| consumer OS and more functional than NT for everything
| else. Libraries and schools deployed it. The majority of
| gamers, enthusiasts, and tech people used it. From
| 2000-2002 it was practically the only Windows OS anyone
| used. Plenty of people continued to use it after XP's
| release, due to XP's various issues and (let's be honest)
| infantilizing theme.
| wruza wrote:
| NT/OU VMS/WNT to save you an increment.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| Thank you for that. It's the first time I saw the
| connection: WNT -> VMS.
|
| It's like HAL, the computer in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001:
| A Space Odyssey", where HAL is before IBM.
| EGreg wrote:
| Wow is that on purpose??
| miki123211 wrote:
| Also MS (as in Microsoft) comes before NT, so you can
| also interpret it as NT coming after the "traditional" MS
| Windows?
| irb wrote:
| Apparently not
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Naming
| edgyquant wrote:
| What exactly do you think this page says and what is part
| of that comment is "apparently not" in response to?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Here's what the page says:
|
| > It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the
| initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each
| letter by one. However, the project was originally
| intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as
| "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand. One of the
| original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the
| name was taken from the original target processor--the
| Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").
|
| I can't figure out what this is referring to, though.
| Maybe you can do better.
| blagie wrote:
| The history, as I recall it:
|
| - VMS developer develops WNT, playfully incrementing each
| letter of his prior OS from former employer, based on
| similar concepts.
|
| - Corporate lawyers.
|
| - Obvious explanation vehemently denied.
|
| - Alternative explanations abound.
|
| You can believe what you want. I chose Occam's Razor.
| pavlov wrote:
| There are plenty of generic names in software that refer to
| some element of the product.
|
| Apple has a word processor called Pages, while Microsoft
| has one called Word. There were many applications before
| these that operated on pages and words.
|
| If the trademark is "Microsoft Windows", it's just as
| specific as "Apple Pages".
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I couldn't tell -- which of these is trademarked?
| - Microsoft Word - Microsoft Teams -
| Microsoft 365 - Microsoft Office - Apple
| Pages
|
| I searched here, but didn't know how to interpret the
| results: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/
| jameshart wrote:
| Microsoft's own list (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft
| .com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... - PDF warning) - while it
| explicitly says it is non-exhaustive - doesn't appear to
| claim 'Word' or any variant of it - only the word icons
| and logos. From your list it lists Microsoft 365 and
| Microsoft Teams and Office 365, but not Microsoft Office.
| MadVikingGod wrote:
| Thanks to jameshart's list, and the search you provided I
| found:
|
| - Windows: No Microsoft needed https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#ca
| seNumber=74090419&caseSearchType=U... - Microsoft Teams:
| Needs Microsoft https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=876876
| 87&caseSearchType=U... - Nothing for Word - Microsoft
| 365: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87640393&caseSear
| chType=U... - No Microsoft Office, but Office 365: https:
| //tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85387679&caseSearchType=U...
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Trademarks don't apply to all contexts.
| blagie wrote:
| There was an action. It barely went Microsoft's way. You
| can pull on this reference trail:
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-own-windows-trademark-
| micro...
|
| I believe the problem is that "Window System" is generic
| (as in X Window System, often referred to as X-Windows).
| That made it hard, but not impossible, for Microsoft to
| defend "Windows." After enough appeals, courts decided
| "Window" and "Windows" aren't the same thing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Thank you for often referring to it as X-Windows.
|
| -The Window Management
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-
| disaster-128d398...
| jacobsimon wrote:
| I thought OpenAI was the first to develop and use the term
| GPT[1]. So maybe a more apt comparison than RNA would be PCR,
| which was a technique developed in a private lab and patented,
| even though it was published in scientific journals etc.
|
| 1. https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-
| unsupervised...
| blagie wrote:
| Doesn't matter either way who invented it. This is trademark,
| not patent.
|
| If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy
| from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language
| Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not "Improving
| Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (TM)"
|
| They ALSO would have needed to use a different generic term
| to refer to the technique. For example, Velcro always says
| things like "Velcro-brand hook-and-loop," and ALWAYS uses a
| generic term to refer to hook-and-loop when talking across
| brands. It ONLY uses "Velcro(tm)" to talk about their product
| specifically. OpenAI started using GPT generically.
|
| Publications like this one, if anything, undermine OpenAI's
| case since they're using the term generically.
|
| The decision is correct. Trademark law is used precisely to
| prevent this sort of thing: OpenAI can have a generic term or
| a trademark. The law is set up precisely to prevent a company
| from building their brand value by retroactively trademarking
| a generic term once relying on a community to get it
| established.
|
| To be more blunt: I use "GPT" generically because they
| encouraged me to do so. That should not contribute brand
| value to OpenAI GPT-3 or OpenAI GPT-4.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Also, why would a "non-profit" need to trademark it?
| Anduia wrote:
| Many do so in order to maintain their integrity and
| reputation. For example, the name Wikipedia and the
| Wikipedia logo are registered trademarks.
|
| In the case of fundrising and sponsorship, it assures to
| sponsors the legitimity of that campaign, because there
| is no conflict with other organisation or company using
| the same name.
|
| I could go on, but I hope you get the point.
| numbsafari wrote:
| Non-profits seek trademarks for all sorts of reasons that
| have nothing to do with profit.
| dumbfounder wrote:
| And, non-profits doesn't mean they don't do things that
| they profit from, it just means they aren't trying to
| achieve profits for their owners. Endowments are non-
| profits, but they most certainly are making investments
| to achieve profits for the purpose of pushing that money
| into charitable vehicles.
| numbsafari wrote:
| A non-profit may also want to prevent others from
| profiting from their work by using their trademarks
| without approval for private gain.
|
| Having a trademark just means you are protecting a name,
| not that you are seeking to extract value, per se.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Non profit is a business structure not a designation
| meaning "no business acumen." Many non profits are
| actually quite profitable and active businesses, but they
| have no beneficial owners, pay no dividends, etc, and
| often have some mission that's in some way broadly
| beneficial. This exempts them from certain taxation and
| other benefits. But it absolutely doesn't mean everything
| they do is done altruistically without material
| consideration and definitely doesn't mean with no legal
| claims or recourse for protecting their works or
| identities.
| dizhn wrote:
| Plus they still get to pay huge salaries.
| jameshart wrote:
| Maybe because they need expensive skills
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| I'm sure the highly paid charity execs would say so.
| Trouble is, the charity space often suffers from a broken
| market feedback mechanism, where the people paying for
| the product are not the people consuming the product, and
| this can lead to a business structure that looks like a
| pure-play marketing machine hooked up to exec pockets
| with occasional leakage into a small amount of actual
| charity work.
|
| "But the situation occurs in regular business too!
| Monopolies, oligopolies, etc happen when the market
| feedback mechanism breaks!"
|
| Yeah, and we should go after those too. It's really
| astonishing the lengths to which people go to defend bad
| behavior.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Non profit doesn't necessarily mean charity.
|
| For instance, the life line company ("help me I've fallen
| and can't get up") is (or was) organized as a non profit.
| They sold devices and services at a decent margin. Their
| excess revenues went back to employees in wages and
| perks. Executives and founders especially enjoyed
| extravagant life styles.
| dizhn wrote:
| I was going to say both Visa and Mastercard are non
| profit but apparently this changed in 2006.
|
| I guess it makes sense like a "Got Milk?", or "the other
| white meat" for banks.
| rvnx wrote:
| Like the charity Wikimedia, that needs 6-figures salaries
| to coordinate volunteers filling webpages.
|
| Nobody with skills would be happy to be the one that
| represents Wikimedia for less than 780'000 USD right ?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Most people with the organizational skills to operate a
| complex enterprise demands a pretty significant
| compensation package. Even if you found someone to do it
| for considerably less once they've proven effective they
| would become highly sought after in the labor market and
| would be poached away leading to churn and turnover in
| roles that really benefit from stability over time. While
| it is likely there is someone who doesn't mind living a
| life of austerity when capable securing of a much more
| comfortable lifestyle for them and their family, it can
| be really hard to find them and require a lot of churn in
| mishiring the talent and losing skilled talent due to
| inflicting non market bearing penury on them and their
| loved ones out of some weird morality not supported by
| the surrounding culture and society.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Most people with the organizational skills to operate a
| complex enterprise demands a pretty significant
| compensation package
|
| That is mainly USA, such people are pretty cheap in the
| rest of the world.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I have a friend who with their CPA got a job at a non
| profit and they were worried they would pigeon hole into
| a specific industry and the concept of non profit worried
| them about their career. My advice to them was non profit
| does not mean "not profitable to you." Depending on the
| non profit salaries can be greatly outsized and often
| perks are outstanding. All that excess cash goes
| somewhere and some non profits enjoy enormous margins and
| lucrative markets, but the accounting and related rules
| are specialized.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| To their execs. It's basically a meme in non-profit world
| how poorly everyone outside the C-suite gets paid and how
| the non-profit "mission" is weaponized against workers in
| salary negotiations.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| So other people can't pretend to be them or their
| products and do things like raise funds. Which is also
| the point of "for profit" trademarks
| ArnoVW wrote:
| For the same reason Wikipedia needs a trademark, or any
| successful open source project. To prevent grifters from
| hitching a ride off your word and muddying the water /
| confusing users of your service or product
| HWR_14 wrote:
| To prevent for profit companies from using it. The
| Olympic Rings and the Red Cross's Red Cross logo are both
| trademarked.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Velcro has an amusing campaign regarding their trademark:
|
| https://www.velcro.com/original-thinking/the-velcro-brand-
| tr...
| kristofferR wrote:
| This is seriously the type of language that will get men
| to want to "abuse" the Velcro trademark more.
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/iptv-anti-piracy-threats-may-
| increa...
| jrockway wrote:
| Unlikely. The Velcro trademark has been so far gone for
| decades that I doubt there is a single person on the
| planet that knows it's the name of a company and not a
| generic term for hook and loop fastener.
|
| The next company you'll see in this position is probably
| Google. I think that verb will outlive Google Search.
| singingboyo wrote:
| More importantly, knowing and caring are two different
| things.
|
| I know that Velcro/Kleenex/Google are specific brands,
| but I don't really care - the common usage is so far gone
| that there's rarely a reason to use hook & loop
| fastener/tissue paper/internet search instead.
|
| Hell, for some people, "iPad" is a semi-generic term for
| a tablet. (Though I don't get that one, personally.)
| noboostforyou wrote:
| > Hell, for some people, "iPad" is a semi-generic term
| for a tablet. (Though I don't get that one, personally.)
|
| I remember when the NFL first started using Microsoft
| Surface tablets during the broadcast, except the
| commentators would keep referring to them as iPads. By
| the next week's broadcast, every single commentator had a
| giant "Microsoft Surface" branded tablet cover in front
| of them at the desk and overall the logos were plastered
| everywhere.
| smolder wrote:
| > I doubt there is a single person on the planet that
| knows ...
|
| Are we not persons on the planet?
| elzbardico wrote:
| Speak for yourself, human.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I always had the vague idea that probably Velcro was a
| trademark, but TIL that there's a company called Velcro
| too. I always thought Velcro was another DuPont product.
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| there is similar fervor around LEGO
| https://legonotlegos.com/
| technothrasher wrote:
| > If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy
| from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language
| Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not
| "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-
| Training (TM)"
|
| While the (TM) is useful to alert people to your trademark
| claim, you are not required to use it to establish your
| trademark. Simply using a unique mark to identify your
| goods or services and being the first to do so is enough.
| gcr wrote:
| Then why did openAI fail here, in your view?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because they didn't make any effort to treat this like a
| trade mark until after the term itself become generic to
| the public. If you want a trademark you need to be
| careful how you use it and how others use it to ensure it
| doesn't become a generic term. Once something is a
| generic term it is almost impossible to get it back. (it
| has been done: Xerox used to be the generic term people
| used for make a copy - but most of the effort was their
| competitors who for obvious reasons didn't want to use
| their competitors company name as a generic term)
|
| If you want a trademark you need to defend it. That means
| you know the generic term and use that when required.
| That means when anyone uses your trademark in a generic
| way your lawyers are immediately sending letters. Check
| with a lawyer - there are a lot more details you have to
| get right.
| CactusOnFire wrote:
| Yeah, just because OpenAI has gotten away with using open
| source ideology for regulatory capture in the AI space,
| but that doesn't mean they can get away with it in the
| intellectual property space.
| autokad wrote:
| is it a generic term? when I think gpt I only think
| openAI's work
| nicklecompte wrote:
| RNA, PCR, and GPT all have precisely the same problem: the
| acronyms are purely technical.
|
| - ribonucleic acid
|
| - polymerase chain reaction
|
| - generative pretrained transformer
|
| You can't trademark the phrase "polymerase chain reaction"
| because there are many types of polymerase chain reactions,
| not just the ones used for copying DNA. [ETA: specifically I
| mean "copying DNA at commercial scale" i.e. the patented
| biochemical engineering techniques.] Likewise a generative
| neural network using pre-training with a transformer
| architecture is simply too generic to trademark "generative
| pretrained transformer." And if you can't trademark the
| phrase you can't trademark the acronym.
| snitty wrote:
| I endorse this analysis.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| Your local IP attorney.
| refurb wrote:
| What about International Business Machine?
| nicklecompte wrote:
| IBM doesn't sell products called "international business
| machines" and hold a trademark on that product name,
| which would force competing manufacturers to call them
| "devices for transcontinental enterprise" etc. IBM is a
| business name, that's a different thing. More
| importantly, nobody calls computers "international
| business machines," that name reflects IBM's 19th-century
| origins, so having a trademark on "International Business
| Machines" has no impact on competing businesses.
|
| A hypothetical 1930s computing company called Central
| Processor Units would have probably changed its name in
| the 1950s, since "CPU" wouldn't be trademarkable and
| their brand name wouldn't be worth very much. (A
| trademark on "CPU" would be needlessly detrimental to
| other computer manufacturers, or at best confusing,
| especially after the von Neumann architecture became the
| universal standard.) Of course in this alternate universe
| maybe CPUs would have been called something else, and
| maybe if IBM never existed we would be calling computers
| "business machines."
|
| IANAL but I think it's a mistake to apply "If A then B"
| rules to this stuff and try to invalidate reasonable
| guidelines based on specific counterexamples. Judges need
| to consider how language is actually used in context by
| the people working in those areas. This is why the USPTO
| cited so many businesses and practitioners using GPT in a
| generic context.
| bhickey wrote:
| The term 'GPT' was first used in the BERT paper to refer to
| Generic Pre-trained Transformers. [0]
|
| > The fine-tuning approach, such as the Generative Pre-
| trained Transformer (OpenAI GPT) (Radford et al., 2018),
| introduces minimal task-specific parameters, and is trained
| on the downstream tasks by simply fine-tuning all pre-trained
| parameters.
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
| niutech wrote:
| BERT paper is from 11 Oct 2018 and the OpenAI paper it was
| referring to "Improving Language Understanding by
| Generative Pre-Training" is from 11 Jun 2018:
| https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-
| unsupervised...
| lolinder wrote:
| Yes, but that paper that you link to doesn't ever call it
| GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers. It talks about
| training Transformers with Generative Pretraining, both
| of which are pre-existing concepts by this point.
|
| I also looked on the OpenAI website in Sep 2018 and could
| find no reference to GPT or Generative Pretrained
| Transformers, so I think OP might be right about BERT
| using it first.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20180923011305/https://blog.op
| ena...
| lolinder wrote:
| That paper is using a pre-existing term "Generative
| Pretraining" [0] and applying it to Transformers (a Google
| innovation [1]). As far as I can see from a search, they
| don't even use the term GPT or Generative Pretrained
| Transformers in that paper, and they don't in the
| accompanying blog post either [2]. A sibling [3] claims that
| the BERT paper in Oct 2018 was the first to use the term GPT
| to describe what OpenAI built, and that sounds reasonable
| since a cursory look through the Sep 2018 archive of
| openai.com turns up nothing.
|
| [0] See this 2012 example:
| http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf
|
| [1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee24354
| 7de...
|
| [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20180923011305/https://blog.op
| ena...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802
| kurthr wrote:
| Yeah, but my 2 year old Generative Potty-Trained Transformer
| needs an acronym too!
|
| Seriously, like TLA domain names and other TLA acronyms,
| there just aren't enough to allow trademark. Imagine, if 5
| letter LASER had been trademarked? Would that have also
| covered LASIK (Laser assisted sub-epithelial keratectomy)?
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Good. Now they are forced to finally give it a proper name.
| war321 wrote:
| Yeah, ChatGPT is such a clinical name for a consumer facing
| app. Especially considering how easy AI stuff is to
| anthropomorphize. Google had the right idea with Bard and
| Gemini.
| Thorrez wrote:
| I would think they would be able to trademark ChatGPT.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| yes, they shouldn't have let an engineer name it.
| timmb wrote:
| I love how terrible the name is from a branding
| perspective. It actually makes it feel more legit like a
| new tech rather than yet another wannabe assistant. And
| from what I can see, few have heard of Gemini, Bard,
| Cortana, Copilot, or Jeeves compared to ChatGPT, which
| has something of the charm of R2D2 or C3PO.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| ChatGPT was never intended/expected by OpenAI to be a big
| deal in of itself. GPT-3 had been a big step up in
| capability from GPT-2, but of course wasn't getting any
| attention outside of the ML world since it wasn't
| something people could actually use. OpenAI built ChatGPT
| (says Altman) basically just to showcase GPT-3 since
| nobody else had bothered to do it. I don't think they
| were expecting the public to be so enthralled with it and
| actually find so many useful things to do with it.
| exitb wrote:
| And yet I suspect it's the only one my parents may
| recognize as an AI product.
| tavavex wrote:
| Is it so terrible then? "GPT" has a nice ring to it,
| especially considering that it wasn't meant to become a
| household name - before ChatGPT blew up, only people who
| were interested in the AI field knew what GPT was at all.
| tavavex wrote:
| Honestly, it feels a lot more straightforward to me, which
| is what I like - it's named after what it is, and isn't
| slathered in marketing grease, where every word is
| optimized to be the most average Joe-friendly. I'd take
| ChatGPT over Funky Happy Little Guy Arthur Intelli (get it,
| it's just like a real person) every day of the week.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| OpenAI came up with the term Generative Pre-Training with the
| paper introducing what is now called GPT-1. Not arguing that
| they should own a trademark for it but saying they are
| "hijacking" the term is disingenuous.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It's a pretty dumb acronym though since it's doubly
| redundant.
|
| The "T" is the only descriptive bit. The transformer is
| inherently a generative architecture - a sequence
| predictor/generator, so "generative" adds nothing to the
| description. All current neural net models are trained before
| use, so "pretrained" adds nothing either.
|
| It's like calling a car an MPC - a mobile pre-assembled car.
| lolinder wrote:
| No, they took a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining"[0]
| and applied it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]) to
| get Generative Pretrained Transformers [2]. Even if you
| looked at the full name, that paper doesn't use GPT or
| Generative Pretrained Transformers at all from what I can
| tell, this commenter [3] claims that the name was first used
| in the BERT paper.
|
| [0] See this 2012 example:
| http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf
|
| [1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee24354
| 7de...
|
| [2] https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-
| unsupervised...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802
| udev4096 wrote:
| Shilling for a multi billion dollar corporation makes you
| look like a fool and even more so when clearly they are on
| the wrong side of the argument here
| lupire wrote:
| Descriptive terms cannot be trademarks, for obvious reasons.
| Corporations are not permitted to own the English language.
|
| https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/strong-trademarks
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user
| doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means,
| and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A
| technology has already been established.
|
| Maybe I'm just an ancient wreck of a computer nerd, but my
| first understanding of GPT was "Grand Partition Table" as a GNU
| joke/meme/misunderstanding for "GUID Partition Table", and to
| this day I _can not_ redefine or re-remember it to whatever the
| hell OpenAI wants it to mean.
| lupire wrote:
| No one knows what word the T in Mr T stands for, but everyone
| knows _who_ it stands for.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| Twitter went the extreme way... they hijacked a letter...
| Alphabet is not much better.
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| As much as I don't really have an issue with what Musk did to
| Twitter mainly because I don't use it, X is a shitty name.
| Could've made a cool new name like Phaser or XLog or
| something.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| the worst part is that he owns x.com and is not using it.
| manojlds wrote:
| Noob question - how is someone able to trademark Apple but not
| GPT?
| HPsquared wrote:
| This case would be like an apple company selling apples trying
| to trademark the word "apple".
| eru wrote:
| See also Apple (the music company) vs Apple Computer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
| threeseed wrote:
| Trademarks are localised to specific industries.
|
| So I can apply for a trademark for Apple Cleaners or Apple Tax
| Accountant just not Apple Computers.
| yard2010 wrote:
| ....good luck with that!
| bradyd wrote:
| https://applecleaners.com/
| eru wrote:
| Yes, you can try that. Though keep in mind that the well-
| known Apple can afford a lot of expensive lawyers.
| razakel wrote:
| So could Paul McCartney.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. But commenter threeseed probably can't.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In some ways it's closer to Apple (computer) performing a
| SLAPP. If the legal system were fair in magnitude of costs,
| then Apple couldn't get away with it.
|
| Instead of looking at the outliers that exist in huge
| corporations, looking at arguments in small businesses that
| don't have unlimited budgets generally shows a more even
| system.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| > Registration is refused because the applied-for mark merely
| describes a feature, function, or characteristic of applicant's
| goods and services.
|
| Apple is a brand name that contains no technical information,
| whereas GPT is a technical term describing what the software
| does. OpenAI cannot patent transformers or generative
| pretraining, so it makes no sense for them to be able to
| trademark "generative pre-trained transformer."
|
| So a better analogy would be Apple trying to trademark Screen
| Time so that no other smartphone OS could name its usage-
| tracking feature "Screen Time" - you can't trademark a
| description of what the software does.
| amelius wrote:
| That's the technical explanation.
|
| It doesn't explain why society thinks this is an effective
| and fair set of rules.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Are consumers likely to be confused?" is the way lawyers
| explained the positive case to me. An "Apple" computer
| isn't likely to be bought by accident to be used as an
| ingredient in a fruit salad, but a "Sorny" TV might well be
| bought instead of a "Sony" model.
|
| They also follow this up with "you have to aggressively
| defend trademarks just in case".
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Which is why Apple Corps and Apple Computer had several
| legal battles over the years, especially once Apple (the
| computer company) started selling music
| ben_w wrote:
| "App Store" would be my example, as they had a legal fight
| over that, initially getting the trademark then not being
| able to prevent Amazon using "Amazon Appstore".
| input_sh wrote:
| Because trademarks apply to specific sectors, not everything.
| You can't make a computer and call your brand Apple. You can
| make Apple Bottoms jeans, and because the two are operating in
| completely separate industries, customers don't get confused.
|
| But GPT is already generate enough in its sector, so...
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Here's a dumb question - If the sent date is Feb06, why are we
| hearing of this slightly over a week later?
| bagels wrote:
| It wasn't put on the website till now, or nobody saw it till
| now, or nobody posted it here till now?
| unreal37 wrote:
| What was your expectation? Would it be slower for the
| government to update its website with email correspondence? Or
| faster?
|
| A week seems... normal.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| I thought it would be a top story is all.
| petercooper wrote:
| I go through most links submitted to this site and you'd be
| surprised just how much relevant or otherwise interesting
| stuff doesn't make the front page. You could quite easily
| start an alternative HN variant populated solely with items
| that don't make it.
| klausa wrote:
| It was posted on HN sooner, just didn't get traction.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Ah, the danger of single sourcing. Thanks
| pwdisswordfishc wrote:
| UEFI Forum exhaled in relief.
| IceHegel wrote:
| The typesetting is giving me a headache wish they had used latex.
| olalonde wrote:
| I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to use an
| obscure academic acronym for customer facing products. I guess
| they didn't expect their "API demo" to blow up the way it did and
| are now stuck with the name.
| imiric wrote:
| ChatGPT is not really a customer facing product. It's a crude
| interface over an LLM, directed more towards developers and
| tech enthusiasts who will use it to create customer facing
| products, rather than towards the general public. It only
| exploded in popularity because of its novelty, but it's far
| from being generally accessible or useful.
| pooper wrote:
| ChatGPT is still the only (free of cost? haven't tried
| anything paid) chat assistant things that allow me to have a
| conversation in that I push a button and then it keeps
| listening. I say something it replies and goes back to
| listening mode without me having to press a button.
| mousetree wrote:
| My grandmother uses ChatGPT
| hparadiz wrote:
| I've been generating images with stable diffusion in the
| hopes of creating a snowboard design using my own personal
| computer and the results so far are actually incredible. And
| we're still in early days.
|
| Setting up a text only LLM is just as trivial. And frankly
| better cause you can train it for yourself and tag out a
| model and save it.
| hawski wrote:
| People I don't find technical in my circle used it before me
| and still use it. In my circle it was more correlated to
| younger age - early 20s, than to technical ability.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| The usage is so widespread already, it's really amazing.
| olalonde wrote:
| I know that was the initial plan, hence why I referred to it
| as an "API demo", but they now reportedly have hundreds of
| million active users.
| edwinjm wrote:
| Haha. It has always been targeted towards consumers. They
| even removed the `temperature` setting.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Not _always_. It was just a demo they chucked online. It
| very quickly _became_ a consumer app after it got traction,
| though.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean we can find countless other products this occurred
| with in history so I'm not sure what exactly you're
| trying to measure by it?
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| It's just that it wasn't something they expected or
| designed to get mass adoption.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Countless non-techies at my work use ChatGPT. Several members
| of my family use ChatGPT, most of them haven't done as much
| as write an Excel formula. My partner and her friends all use
| ChatGPT, none of them techies. South Park literally had an
| episode (over a year ago?) where the entire plot was about
| using ChatGPT to cheat at both performing in AND marking
| assessments, as well as responding to needy romantic
| partners. You are completely, incomprehensibly incorrect.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I can also say from in-depth professional experience that
| OpenAI's "GPT" models, both via ChatGPT and via the API,
| can be used to assess student performances in a way that
| correlates very highly with a human judge. So it's not just
| people fooling themselves into thinking that ChatGPT is
| useful.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not saying that it's not popular or not used by non-
| technical people. I'm saying that its utility as a general
| consumer product is limited and unclear. Most people don't
| have a need for a text generator or chatbot, but they would
| find LLMs useful if they're integrated into other products
| they already use.
|
| Think of the difference between the Rabbit R1 device and
| ChatGPT. One is, or attempting to be, something that makes
| a concrete difference in people's lives. The other is a
| glorified tech demo trying to find a use case. I'm not
| vouching for the Rabbit R1 device, just pointing out the
| difference between a consumer product and ChatGPT.
|
| Most of the gold rush and buzz about LLMs today is in
| delivering a consumer product, not about GPT-5 or whatever
| the smarter chatbot is.
| wruza wrote:
| The idea of narrowing the use cases is absolutely non-
| natural and probably comes from the marketing area for
| projects that are otherwise bad in most regards.
|
| _Most people don 't have a need for a text generator or
| chatbot_
|
| I believe you never realized why you'd need it yourself.
| Izkata wrote:
| Most people I've seen are using it as a replacement for
| google search. Its genericness is the killer feature.
| michaelt wrote:
| Isn't "Generative Pre-Trained Transformer" an obscure acronym
| that _openai came up with_ though?
|
| I know openai didn't invent the transformer, but "Attention Is
| All You Need" is about translation, they don't mention the word
| "generative"
| quonn wrote:
| But that class of models has been known as generative for
| years even before the attention paper.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think that's a weak reason to deny a trademark, given
| WIMP interfaces were well known before MS Windows.
| bhickey wrote:
| > Isn't "Generative Pre-Trained Transformer" an obscure
| acronym that openai came up with though?
|
| Nope, they didn't coin the acronym. First appearance of
| OpenAI GPT was in the BERT paper by Devlin et al. 2018.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| Who cares if it's an "obscure academic acronym"? Nobody cares.
| "Laser" is an "obscure academic acronym", it didn't prevent it
| from catching on. In ChatGPT's case, you should ask around -
| people remember the name just fine.
| olalonde wrote:
| Unlike laser, it's difficult to pronounce and remember.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Phew! My Gay Panda Therapy business is safe... for now.
| 1f60c wrote:
| As someone who is both a paid customer of ChatGPT Plus and the
| API (in other words, a loyal customer), I'm glad to see this.
|
| While companies can and should do better than name everything
| _Company_ GPT, this sends a clear message that OpenAI doesn't own
| the concept of GPTs, even if it's a meaningless string of letters
| to most people.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Good because GPT was a terrible brand. I don't mean as in "oh no
| they use a term". I mean as in its a very obscure term for most.
| There are way better names to come up with. And "GPTs" is even
| worse as a way to express "customizable prompts and knowledge
| files".
| whatsthatabout wrote:
| It's really honorable that OpenAI keeps their promise of bringing
| open-source AI to the people! /s
| cientifico wrote:
| I find it surprising how quickly we rush to pass judgment on
| OpenAI's actions without understanding the motivations behind
| their attempt to trademark. It's possible that they are seeking
| protection against others who might register the same, or it
| could be a measure to prevent customers from unknowingly sharing
| sensitive company data with a GPT indexer unrelated to OpenAI. If
| anyone has evidence of OpenAI acting in bad faith, please share
| it.
| matsemann wrote:
| If they're worried about people confusing their service with
| others, shouldn't they then just choose a different name than
| the tech it's built on? I don't see MySQL or others being
| afraid of them being confused with other databases.
| rerdavies wrote:
| MyGPT is almost definitely trademarkable. (Although MySQL
| might sue).
| buildfocus wrote:
| I don't think the debate here is about motivation - the concern
| is that in itself, regardless of the reasons, attempting to
| trademark a generic technical term is bad behaviour.
| stavros wrote:
| I have evidence of them acting in bad faith: They're trying to
| trademark a generic term.
| rightbyte wrote:
| This "they have to do bad thing or someone else might" excuse
| is not working out anymore for me.
| scaryclam wrote:
| Given how they characterise GPTs in general as custom versions
| of chatGPT (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts), I don't
| think it's a stretch to assume they're not being very
| benevolent in this trademark attempt. You should also be asking
| for evidence that they are acting in good faith, if you're
| interested in determining their actual motivations.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Let's trademark all words in dictionary and all 3 letters
| combinations.
| rerdavies wrote:
| No need to trademark all 3 letter combinations, because all
| three letter acronyms have already been purchased by DNS
| squatters. It would be crazy to choose a name for a company or
| product for which you can't get the domain name.
| seydor wrote:
| Good they need to find a better name anyway. Also how about
| changing their own name to closedAI
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| Please remember that Sam uses only lowercase letters. So it
| needs to be one word only, or use "-_", like closed_ai, really-
| closed-ai, agi-and-i
| matwood wrote:
| _ would lose the efficiencies gained by avoiding the shift
| key so only - can be used
| Havoc wrote:
| I have colleagues that capitalise by toggling caps lock on
| and then off again so the efficiency gains might be real
| for them lol
| matwood wrote:
| I used to work with a good programmer who hunt and pecked
| using his index fingers. I thought it was funny, but it
| drove the vim guy in the office nuts.
| sbarre wrote:
| I refer to myself as a "six and a half finger typist"
| because I never did learn proper touch typing, but I can
| still type faster than most people.
|
| I do use the Backspace key a lot though. :-)
| illusive4080 wrote:
| Mainframe programmer probably
| lobsterthief wrote:
| The best keyboard productivity I gained was remapping the
| CAPS key to do nothing in macOS. I've been considering
| remapping it to the `backtick key since I use that so
| much in Slack discussions and when writing documentation
| sbarre wrote:
| I know some people who map the CAPS key to Tab, so they
| don't have to stretch the pinky finger as far...
| matwood wrote:
| I have it mapped to ESC.
| amargulies wrote:
| I have it mapped to CMD. Quite a bit nicer than using my
| thumb for CMD
| aftbit wrote:
| Mine is mapped to F14 in Windows, which is rebound to
| push-to-mute on Discord. Great for gaming. And yes, there
| are more F keys above F12.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > And yes, there are more F keys above F12.
|
| Well, on most keyboards there aren't actual keys, but
| instead shift-F1 through shift-F12 produce F13-F24.
| dbtc wrote:
| caps->control
|
| did you know that c-a c-e c-n c-p c-d work everywhere in
| macOS like they do in emacs?
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| He uses lower case also on the phone, which autocapitalizes
| words...
|
| He wants to show the word that he's faster, but in reality
| he's not interested in being more efficient.
| jeanlucas wrote:
| AGI and I lol
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Go trademark this, run.
| firtoz wrote:
| I and I don't approve this
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Generic tangents are against the rules.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I think CashAI should also be considered.
| seydor wrote:
| I believe they accept credit cards
| lagt_t wrote:
| Rare patent office win
| brikym wrote:
| I guess they have to settle for plan B: Chad Gipitty
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| The primary issue is that the OpenAI name lacks appeal.
|
| Moreover, it harbors a cringe-worthy idiosyncrasy, given that
| _there 's nothing 'open' about OpenAI_.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| I guarantee you that over 99% of OpenAI's paying user base do
| not give a hoot about this "open AI" thing. It literally
| doesn't matter outside of people whining on Hacker News and
| Twitter. I'd eat my hat if it was the deciding factor for ONE
| person choosing whether or not to use an OpenAI product. If
| this is a big issue for you, you're probably opposed to closed-
| source models in general.
|
| Open sounds like a fancy computer word, and AI is....literally
| AI, two letters people are very excited about. I very much
| doubt that OpenAI has a branding problem.
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| It sounds like a meme name the moment you know how OpenAI
| started.
|
| I use and pay for their products and I find them absolutely
| great. I'm obviously opposed to closed source models and
| knowledge for AI because I've seen how important was the GPT
| paper by Google. You're making judgments and assumptions and
| that is quite annoying.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Can they get "grok" and "meta" back too? I really miss new words.
| zogrodea wrote:
| GPT had previously been used as an acronym for market-research
| websites like Amazon MTurk (participants Get Paid To fill
| surverys) before the LLM craze so it does seem like a bad
| trademark.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I believe trademarks are usually scoped to a specific usecase,
| so it's possible that wouldn't be infringing if the trademark
| were granted.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I didn't know that. Thanks for the information.
|
| I think Apple's trademark lawsuit against a.pl (Polish
| grocery site) [0] failed for that reason, so it seems good
| that the concept looks like it's limited to specific fields.
|
| https://www.pcworld.com/article/461258/apple_vs_a_pl_tech_co.
| ..
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| There are so many example of trademark abuse... Like Monster
| Energy SLAPPing anyone who uses the word Monster [0: search for
| 'monster energy sues', there's too many to pick a single one]. Or
| King trying to SLAPP The Banner Saga for using the word Saga [1].
| Or Bethesda SLAPPing Mojang for "Scrolls" [2].
|
| I'm probably missing a ton more of these, but to be fair, it is
| quite easy to mistake these with copyrights issues, because it's
| usually the same companies that abuse that system as well.
|
| I'm not certain if these are SLAPP, but I do like the sound of
| the acronym. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/slapp_suit]
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2014/01/23/candy-
| crush...
|
| [2]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2012/03/16/bethesda-a...
| blackshaw wrote:
| Entrepreneur magazine are famous for this too.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Or Monster Cables...
| armcat wrote:
| I went a bit meta on this and supplied the trademark report to
| ChatGPT, prompting it to summarize. It did so as follows:
|
| _The US Trademark Office rejected the application, deeming "GPT"
| merely descriptive of the features, functions, or characteristics
| of OpenAI's goods and services. The decision was based on
| extensive evidence showing "GPT" is widely used in the industry
| to refer to a specific type of AI technology, making it not
| distinctive enough for trademark protection under the Trademark
| Act Section 2(e)(1). Additionally, OpenAI's application was
| partially refused for Class 09 due to unacceptable specimens, as
| they did not demonstrate the mark's use in commerce in a manner
| that allows for the downloading or purchasing of the software._
|
| Also: I understand the trademark decision but does OpenAI have
| any patents on GPT? Google has for example patented word2vec,
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US9037464B1/en
| tolleydbg wrote:
| I don't keep up with the AI space at all, but have they become
| victims of trademark confusion, a la Kleenex?
| lolinder wrote:
| No, the primary reason given for rejection is that the term
| is merely descriptive--GPT just refers to a transformer that
| was trained with generative pre-training. The examining
| attorney gave a bunch of examples of GPT being used to
| describe a type of AI system.
|
| So it's not that the trademark has been diluted (although the
| attorney included a warning that even if the trademarks
| weren't descriptive it's also become generic), the problem is
| that it would never have been an acceptable trademark because
| trademark law doesn't allow you to trademark a description of
| a product that would apply equally well to your competitors'
| products.
| visarga wrote:
| Wondering what's the plan when they transition to Mamba or state
| space models. Still call them GPT, but without the T? GP*
| roydivision wrote:
| Definition of GTP - Generative pre-trained transformer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo...
| joemckenna wrote:
| Leading up to ChatGPT, virtually no model innovation was needed.
| Just some minor tweaks to activation functions and the order in
| which operations were completed in the feedfoward layers. So they
| were essentially trying to trademark the innovation published
| openly in Attention is All You Need?
| JCM9 wrote:
| This was an open and shut case and OpenAI was either delusional
| or just being arrogant in thinking they would get this trademark.
| The PTO is simply applying the law. You can't trademark something
| in common use like this.
| shagie wrote:
| Consider the mess if they _didn 't_ attempt to get it, and a
| trademark troll (yes, they do exist
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_troll ) was able to get
| the trademark and sued everyone.
|
| Should OpenAI get a trademark for GPT? No. Should anyone else?
| No. How do you prevent someone else from trying to get the
| trademark for GPT? Try to get it yourself if you've got a word
| used with a product name.
|
| At worst following this, you get denied - like OpenAI was for
| GPT. But this is better than the worst worst case where you
| don't try and someone else gets it and sues you for trademark
| infringement (and wins? forces you to rebrand?).
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Now do GOFAI "Frame"!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence...
| AlphaJack wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table
| gorjusborg wrote:
| Now that's a GPT to remember.
| xyst wrote:
| I guess OpenAI lawyers don't have the same connections at Meta
| lawyers as USPTO
| tartrate wrote:
| They've come a long way from being open to claiming exclusive
| rights to use a scientific term. Wow.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Bit more discussion last week, probably should have updated the
| URL:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39322046
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| That would literally be the same as Microsoft trying to trademark
| the "-soft" suffix. Can't wait for OpenAI to make more wacky
| decisions over time.
| usrusr wrote:
| I'd say it's somewhere between the -soft hypothetical and
| landgrabs like T-anything that have been tried in reality.
|
| Of course the real question we all want to see answered is did
| they dogfood the trademark application documents?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Good, it was an az move
| canjobear wrote:
| This seems reasonable because GPT has already been used to name
| models that were not developed by OpenAI, like GPT-J and GPT-Neo.
| danielbln wrote:
| GPT-2 predates GPT-J as well as GPT-Neo.
| canjobear wrote:
| It doesn't matter. OpenAI took no action to prevent Eleuther
| from using the name GPT, which shows it wasn't intended as a
| trademark.
| 0xPMW wrote:
| I was rejected by the App Store a few months ago because I named
| my app {AppName}GPT for use of a "registered" trademark. I got
| through their review process with my first few versions, but on
| my third update they rejected. Ultimately, I decided on a name
| change and it's yielded better results for ASO anyways.
| amelius wrote:
| Unrelated but is "App Store" actually trademarked?
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Those claims are quite a land grab.
|
| If on appeal they focused solely on their "Explore GPTs" store, I
| wonder if the USPTO would be more lenient?
| rkagerer wrote:
| Why the word "failed" instead of "refused" (or "rejected")?
| udev4096 wrote:
| Looks a lot less embarrassing right?
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I mean the first two words are general purpose...
| simple10 wrote:
| This is good the trademark failed. It might have been more of a
| defensive move rather than trying to lock up the term for
| OpenAI's exclusive use. Although, I'm sure they would have been
| happy if it succeeded.
|
| Question for a lawyer, but in my experience it's common for
| companies to file trademarks with the expectation they'll lose.
| This creates a precedence for others trying to file similar
| trademarks and clears the way for the company to continue using
| the non-trademarked term without fear of future lawsuit.
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