OpenAI has been refused registration of the trade mark "GPT" in the USA

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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected OpenAI's application to register the trade mark "GPT". This abbreviation stands for "generative pre-trained transformer" - the company's language model architecture.

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USPTO specialists concluded that the term "GPT" is simply descriptive and denotes a whole family of neural network architectures used in AI. Its widespread use has led people to understand GPT as a general description of generative AI technologies, officials said.

Thus, the term cannot become a unique commercial designation for a specific product or service. Accordingly, GPT does not meet the criteria for granting legal protection as a trademark, the USPTO summarised.

OpenAI disagreed with this position, insisting that people would not understand the meaning of the phrase "generative pre-trained transformer." However, the company's arguments did not convince the patent office.

Source: The Register