The US company OpenAI, which developed the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, has filed for the GPT trademark amid numerous attempts by other companies to obtain such a patent, according to TechCrunch.
The beginning
The application was filed in December, and in March the company asked the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to expedite the process, citing “many infringements and counterfeit applications.”
The agency refused to consider the OpenAI application in an expedited manner because the company did not submit all the documents and did not pay the fee. The department’s response states that the company’s lawyers failed to pay the required fee and did not provide “documentary evidence to support the validity” of the request on its part.
In the meantime, other US companies have already applied to register the ThreatGPT, MedicalGPT, DateGPT and DirtyGPT brands. Which are not related to OpenAI.
It could take up to five months to decide whether to grant a patent. According to Carr & Ferrell lawyer Jefferson Sher. He believes that even taking into account the application from OpenAI, the decision is not predetermined. At the same time, the company has “a lot of reasons” to expect the result to be in its favor.
TechCrunch notes that the acronym GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, generative pre-trained transformer) contains the word Transformer. In 2017, it was used by Google for the name of a neural network architecture that has gained widespread adoption.
Patent and issue
In this regard, Sher admitted that even in this case a patent could be issued. He gave the example of IBM. The transcript of its registered name – International Business Machines – also contains a widely used term. This does not guarantee the granting of an OpenAI patent, but such precedents help, Sher believes.
An additional argument may be the fact that the company has been using GPT in the name since 2018. When it first released its neural network, the lawyer added.