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Comment by zvolsky | Hacker News Reader

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zvolsky·

Unlike copyright, trademarks are used to protect consumers from misleading products that pretend to be the real thing.

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Not a lawyer but as a consumer I find the name “Open AI” for a proprietary/ for profit company very misleading.

Are there any legal protections available to me in this regard?

I have the same issue with the clothing brand Free People.

In this case the trademark is to mislead consumers into thinking that Altman AI's GPT is the only one of its kind.

Agreed, GPT has become too common for a trademark to be approved. It can even be revoked for becoming too common of a word for something, like "escalator" had happen many years ago.

https://www.bentley.edu/news/popular-brands-had-their-tradem...

Perhaps ChatGPT wasn't the best name for a product and OpenAI would have gone with something more trademarkable if they knew it would become such a hit. Still, my comment above is a simple application of Hanlon's razor.

ChatGPT is fine as a name, it's pretty distinct. But GPT2, GPT3, GPT4 is OpenAI using the term GPT as if they are the only ones making them. And apart from EleutherAI nobody really challenged that naming conventions so far.

If the product name was OpenAI Transformer, naming the versions OAT2, OAT3, OAT4, and ChatOAT wouldn't be an issue.

Like trademarking DOS

It should probably be noted that OpenAI is also seeking to trademark ChatGPT.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97733261&caseType=SERIAL_...

(Interestingly enough there's a Chinese ecig/vape company that also looking to trademark ChatGPT.)

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=763049f7-7ef8...

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