OpenAI is trying to trademark "GPT". What are your thoughts?

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.

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.

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.

Seems like a good candidate for trademark dilution

If they developed it, then I can see why!

@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.

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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.

Meanwhile I just bought usegpt.ai

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.

I dont personally associate GPT anything with any AI product other than Open AI anyway.

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.

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.

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.

Why are they allowed to rip data from everyone, and then no one is allowed to use GPT?

Yes, it's a good question. I think trademarking "GPT" could potentially limit the usage of the term by other researchers and organizations working on similar models. This is bad, because this will reduce collaborations, and slow down innovation... OpenAI is no longer open, and it very much seems to have become so profit-driven that it will cause competitive problems in the market and in research.