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Good. It's like a company in biomedicine trying to trademark "RNA". I dislike how OpenAI are trying to hijack a term to describe a kind of language model for th
by jug 3y ago
Good. It's like a company in biomedicine trying to trademark "RNA". I dislike how OpenAI are trying to hijack a term to describe a kind of language model for their products and cringed when they introduced "GPTs" and "Making your own GPT". I see what you're trying to do, OpenAI...
So, after a quick glance here -- OpenAI argued that a consumer may not realize this and what GPT means, trying to use this as a defense for hijacking the term for use in their product portfolio, but the attorney thankfully didn't find the argument very convincing due to vast and established Internet evidence. He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established.
- larodi 3y agoNext they try to copyright CHAT perhaps. Indeed very irritating.
- EGreg 3y agoHow did Microsoft trademark Windows? When computer windows existed?
- stavros 3y agoPresumably because "windows" wasn't a term used to describe an OS. They didn't trademark "OS".
- blagie 3y agoWindows didn't start out as an OS. It started out as a windowing system for DOS. That's the landscape all the trademark suits happened in. Footnote: Windows 95/98/ME was still DOS + Windows bundled in one box. Windows XP was the first consumer operating system derived from Windows NT (which was in fact a proper operating system in its own right). Even Windows NT was trademark-iffy. It was a play on VMS (get it? If not, increment each letter).
- zabzonk 3y agowindows 2000 was first
- blagie 3y agoNo, Windows NT was first in the OS line. Windows 2000 was NT 5.0. There was no home / consumer / client version of Windows 2000. The versions were: Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter. Windows XP was the first convergence version, where the home / consumer / client line transitioned to the NT codebase (with Windows Server 2003 still continuing the NT server market line, but now on a common codebase, and with some of the more workstation uses moving down to the XP line).
- zabzonk 3y agoi meant that 2k preceded xp. i had a copy of 2k professional on a couple of consumer sony vaios, bought in high-street stores i.e. consumer products.
- blagie 3y agoshrug And NT was on plenty of high-end devices too. Most e.g. developers and sysadmins ran NT since it came out, over the 95/98/ME line. 95/98/ME were still the consumer brands. At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI, Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores. Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks, more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser by design, etc.
- zabzonk 3y agono, this is all nonsense. really, did any consumer buy an SGI workstation? or a Sun? i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for. windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.
- pavlov 3y agoThere are plenty of generic names in software that refer to some element of the product. Apple has a word processor called Pages, while Microsoft has one called Word. There were many applications before these that operated on pages and words. If the trademark is “Microsoft Windows”, it’s just as specific as “Apple Pages”.
- Tempest1981 3y agoI couldn't tell -- which of these is trademarked? - Microsoft Word - Microsoft Teams - Microsoft 365 - Microsoft Office - Apple Pages I searched here, but didn't know how to interpret the results: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/
- jameshart 3y agoMicrosoft’s own list (https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWArzw https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RW... - PDF warning) - while it explicitly says it is non-exhaustive - doesn’t appear to claim ‘Word’ or any variant of it - only the word icons and logos. From your list it lists Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and Office 365, but not Microsoft Office.
- MadVikingGod 3y agoThanks to jameshart's list, and the search you provided I found: - Windows: No Microsoft needed https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74090419&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74090419&caseSearchType=U... - Microsoft Teams: Needs Microsoft https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87687687&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87687687&caseSearchType=U... - Nothing for Word - Microsoft 365: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87640393&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87640393&caseSearchType=U... - No Microsoft Office, but Office 365: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85387679&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=85387679&caseSearchType=U...
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoTrademarks don’t apply to all contexts.
- blagie 3y agoThere was an action. It barely went Microsoft's way. You can pull on this reference trail: https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-own-windows-trademark-microsoft/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-own-windows-trademark-micro... I believe the problem is that "Window System" is generic (as in X Window System, often referred to as X-Windows). That made it hard, but not impossible, for Microsoft to defend "Windows." After enough appeals, courts decided "Window" and "Windows" aren't the same thing.
- DonHopkins 3y agoThank you for often referring to it as X-Windows. -The Window Management https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398ebd47#ffe4 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...
- jacobsimon 3y agoI thought OpenAI was the first to develop and use the term GPT[1]. So maybe a more apt comparison than RNA would be PCR, which was a technique developed in a private lab and patented, even though it was published in scientific journals etc. 1. https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...
- blagie 3y agoDoesn't matter either way who invented it. This is trademark, not patent. If they wanted a trademark, that needed to appear on copy from day 0. The paper is titled: "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training" and not "Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training (TM)" They ALSO would have needed to use a different generic term to refer to the technique. For example, Velcro always says things like "Velcro-brand hook-and-loop," and ALWAYS uses a generic term to refer to hook-and-loop when talking across brands. It ONLY uses "Velcro(tm)" to talk about their product specifically. OpenAI started using GPT generically. Publications like this one, if anything, undermine OpenAI's case since they're using the term generically. The decision is correct. Trademark law is used precisely to prevent this sort of thing: OpenAI can have a generic term or a trademark. The law is set up precisely to prevent a company from building their brand value by retroactively trademarking a generic term once relying on a community to get it established. To be more blunt: I use "GPT" generically because they encouraged me to do so. That should not contribute brand value to OpenAI GPT-3 or OpenAI GPT-4.
- rubyfan 3y agoAlso, why would a “non-profit” need to trademark it?
- Anduia 3y agoMany do so in order to maintain their integrity and reputation. For example, the name Wikipedia and the Wikipedia logo are registered trademarks. In the case of fundrising and sponsorship, it assures to sponsors the legitimity of that campaign, because there is no conflict with other organisation or company using the same name. I could go on, but I hope you get the point.
- singularity2001 3y agoGood. Now they are forced to finally give it a proper name.
- war321 3y agoYeah, ChatGPT is such a clinical name for a consumer facing app. Especially considering how easy AI stuff is to anthropomorphize. Google had the right idea with Bard and Gemini.
- greenie_beans 3y agoyes, they shouldn't have let an engineer name it.
- timmb 3y agoI love how terrible the name is from a branding perspective. It actually makes it feel more legit like a new tech rather than yet another wannabe assistant. And from what I can see, few have heard of Gemini, Bard, Cortana, Copilot, or Jeeves compared to ChatGPT, which has something of the charm of R2D2 or C3PO.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoChatGPT was never intended/expected by OpenAI to be a big deal in of itself. GPT-3 had been a big step up in capability from GPT-2, but of course wasn't getting any attention outside of the ML world since it wasn't something people could actually use. OpenAI built ChatGPT (says Altman) basically just to showcase GPT-3 since nobody else had bothered to do it. I don't think they were expecting the public to be so enthralled with it and actually find so many useful things to do with it.
- exitb 3y agoAnd yet I suspect it’s the only one my parents may recognize as an AI product.
- tavavex 3y ago
- sailingparrot 3y agoOpenAI came up with the term Generative Pre-Training with the paper introducing what is now called GPT-1. Not arguing that they should own a trademark for it but saying they are “hijacking” the term is disingenuous.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoIt's a pretty dumb acronym though since it's doubly redundant. The "T" is the only descriptive bit. The transformer is inherently a generative architecture - a sequence predictor/generator, so "generative" adds nothing to the description. All current neural net models are trained before use, so "pretrained" adds nothing either. It's like calling a car an MPC - a mobile pre-assembled car.
- lolinder 3y agoNo, they took a pre-existing term "Generative Pretraining"[0] and applied it to Transformers (a Google innovation [1]) to get Generative Pretrained Transformers [2]. Even if you looked at the full name, that paper doesn't use GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformers at all from what I can tell, this commenter [3] claims that the name was first used in the BERT paper. [0] See this 2012 example: http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf http://cs224d.stanford.edu/papers/maas_paper.pdf [1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547de... [2] https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39381802
- udev4096 3y agoShilling for a multi billion dollar corporation makes you look like a fool and even more so when clearly they are on the wrong side of the argument here
- lupire 3y agoDescriptive terms cannot be trademarks, for obvious reasons. Corporations are not permitted to own the English language. https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/strong-trademarks https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/basics/strong-trademarks
- Dalewyn 3y ago>He also pointed out that it doesn't even matter if a user doesn't know specifically what the acronym "GPT" exactly means, and that it's enough that the general connection to AI and Q&A technology has already been established. Maybe I'm just an ancient wreck of a computer nerd, but my first understanding of GPT was "Grand Partition Table" as a GNU joke/meme/misunderstanding for "GUID Partition Table", and to this day I can not redefine or re-remember it to whatever the hell OpenAI wants it to mean.
- lupire 3y agoNo one knows what word the T in Mr T stands for, but everyone knows who it stands for.
- ijhuygft776 3y agoTwitter went the extreme way... they hijacked a letter... Alphabet is not much better.
- _chu1 3y agoAs much as I don't really have an issue with what Musk did to Twitter mainly because I don't use it, X is a shitty name. Could've made a cool new name like Phaser or XLog or something.
- ijhuygft776 3y agothe worst part is that he owns x.com and is not using it.
- greycol 3y agoI expect he's kind of buggered there. He likes the X name for more than just twitter so he won't want to lose control of it. At the same time twitter would be hard pressed to justify using a domain they don't control especially after the wework scandal (or a small part of it) about the same thing.
- Rexxar 3y agoHe owns 100% of twitter (indirectly), there isn't any other share holder. this can't be compared to wework.
- greycol 3y agoSure, but twitter is not financialy stable and if it goes bankrupt then it's not Musk who decides what to do with a gifted x.com; it's used in a way that makes twitter the most value for the shareholders not the majority shareholeder. And as i said (with reguard to wework) if it's not gifted and with the knowledge of the abuses that a shareholder who is lending(and by lending i mean any convoluted contract that leaves Musk in control of it) a company a key asset can inflict on a company, then it's easy for minority shareholders to sue or even agencies to step in.
- fennecfoxy 3y agoI mean, I would have accepted if Google or the original researchers involved wanted to trademark it, since they paid for/did all the work. But OAI has nothing to do with "attention is all you need".