I thought it was a strange choice to use such a technical descriptor in their name. This makes sense.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s a blow to OpenAI’s branding, but don’t expect its competitors to start releasing their own version of the ubiquitous chatbot.

But 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.

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.

Like if you had a cereal called Crunchy O’s, and tried to trademark “crunchy.” In the case of ChatGPT, this is a GPT type AI model — a concept OpenAI did not create, and is not alone in offering — that you chat with.

You can expect things like a “TalkGPT,” no relation, to show up in app stores (indeed they are already there, and numerous) — and OpenAI can’t sue them for using their brand.

That said, OpenAI does have the biggest mindshare by far when someone says “GPT,” so although their legal protections are limited, they retain the first-brander advantage.

The original article contains 421 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!