OpenAI is trying to trademark "GPT". What are your thoughts?
Anil Matcha
44 replies
If you are building a product with GPT in name, be aware
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Tim Novikoff@timnovikoff
Super Teacher
I know this is going to sound crazy, but people should consider making products without using GPT or LLMs. We just launched Super Teacher (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) which is an AI tutor that actually, literally can successfully teach children reading and math and much more, and it doesn't use a single solitary bit of GPT.
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Quilgo
Great question! We are launching our integration with ChatGPT soon and yes, of course, we use the term in our campaigns. As per the name, I think at the moment it is just a hype time, this is why everyone uses it, but I believe with a little amount of time the term will become overused and thus will lose the hype on its own, so naturally you would not want to use it in your brand. It is always good to come up with something unique. It took us a while to get a name for our product Quilgo, but I believe it worth it when it comes to brand building, awareness and recognition.
@igorpavlov interesting observation, What does Quilgo do? Curious to know and Happy to support you in your launch!
Quilgo
@prithviiiraj Quilgo is an online assessment platform with AI automated proctoring. With GPT we solve a pretty large pain point "I do not want to construct my quiz myself, it takes too much time".
Yes of course they should. A lot of people are already creating clickbait products by adding GPT to their name but in reality, those are trash. So, good move. It will cleanup the trash dump caused by small businesses companies and freelancer developers. PH itself is filled with those trashy tools these days.
If they developed it, then I can see why!
EmbedAI
@shirley_louise_daniels GPT is Generate Pretrained Transformed and is not developed by them. It was present from long ago
@matcha_anil - so then they do not have the right, but if the original developers have not TM'd it, then it's up for grabs! 🤔
@matcha_anil Wrong. OpenAI did invent the GPT architecture, you might be confusing GPT with vanilla transformers (which were invented before OpenAI)
Emaildojo by Netcore Cloud
@matcha_anil An intriguing query! This will be a terrific step because, if we focus on only the Product Hunt platform, 8 out of 10 items are based on AI, and half of them are linked to the phrase GPT.
There are also worries that this action would make it harder for researchers and programmers to use the term "GPT" in their own work. The need for brand protection must be balanced with the requirement for open research and development in the area of natural language processing.
It will be interesting to see how this decision plays out and what the implications will be for the broader AI community.
EmbedAI
@snipperbytes Yes, GPT gives instant meaning to any AI product. Interesting to see how this will turn out
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![Ilko Kacharov [Team-GPT]](https://ph-avatars.imgix.net/3566192/bffe7083-5b2f-494d-b719-a6c19a402d52.png?auto=compress&codec=mozjpeg&cs=strip&auto=format&w=36&h=36&fit=crop)
They're using the term GPT since 2018, but they've decided to trademark it now after ChatGPT became so popular. I guess it's a strategic move to avoid infringement and fake services that ruin their reputation.
EmbedAI
@ilko_kacharov But GPT is a generic term. Should they be allowed ?
@matcha_anil Indeed it looks generic to me, but the abbreviation of IBM is also a generic term for International Bussiness Machines
Meanwhile I just bought usegpt.ai
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Kommunicate
Trademarking GPT is good for business. Many companies from the past have seen recurring revenue coming in just because they own the rights of the term.
Also, they deserve it. They made it famous. Earlier, it was just a scientific term no one was interested to know.
Look at it now, it's a household name.
@manab_boruah Oh, of course. But The name "Open" suggest something... Elon was the one who named it open, and wanted to be open. When you have a vision, and have a background like Elon, you just have to use that money to train a Transformer-based model, and you'll get a ChatGPT. Not a big deal, if you have a group of A.I-engineer since Transformer architecture is available.. i think they don't deserve it... And it will cause more problem to the market, and to them as well, if they tradmarking it. Not a Good Idea.
I dont personally associate GPT anything with any AI product other than Open AI anyway.
I think it's about time they do that
Well the term "GPT" has been also used in other generative LLMs which were developed by different companies so that may be an issue (most notably EleutherAI).
In any case it would be wise to have a fallback position if your product uses the term GP in case this happens.
As previously mentioned however by another esteemed commenter, the term may lose its popularity and appeal in the immediate future so this would not be much of an issue.
More generic AI associated terms can be used to market the product to be on the safe side.
I've been warning people about this, but not sure if it'll be successful
My friend said it would be like trying to trademark certain medical terms
In the future this will essentially be like Googling something, and no one will use the GPT part of the term. total waste of money if you ask me. also open AI implies that it is open source, so trademarking it would be more hurtful to the brand identity.
I think it has to do with the transition from open-source, non-profit to a profit orientated company. The name "GPT" won't stick around for a long time imo and is hyped right now since it's known in the mainstream as the first AI based chat solution.
Conversa - Videos That Talk back
As ChatGPT went viral, GPT did transition from being a technical term - specifically referring to how the transformer is structured and trained - into a marketing term. At this point I expect more than 9/10 people could not say what GPT stands for. I think we see an uptick in people referring to large language models and generative AI in a broader sense. As a company we are avoiding using GPT in our naming convention and focusing on building our own brand.
EmbedAI
@val_jones But GPT was present even before OpenAI as it is generic name for transformer architecture. So should they be allowed ?
Conversa - Videos That Talk back
yes, it does refer to specific class of transformer architecture but OpenAI was the first to introduce the acronym GPT in 2018. They are also not trying to trademark the full name: Generative Pre trained Transformers. To qualify for trademark protection, the acronym must not be descriptive and consumers must not be able to recognize them as synonymous with a particular product. One of the tests the trademant offices uses is if the regular user will likely view the full descriptive name and the acronym as synonymous. As mentioned above most consumers associate GPT with the OpenAI company not the original meaning. Of course this would create huge headaches for companies like EleutherAI (GTP-J) and Salesforce (Einstein GTP) who would argue they are using the acronym descriptively.
OpenAI Playground includes several pre-trained models that users can experiment with, and it also allows users to train their own models. ChatGPT is pre-trained, and users can't train it with their own data.
