At Brewer’s Art in Baltimore, MD they just released a beer called GPT (Green Peppercorn Tripel)[1]. They’re likely allowed to do that because a reasonable consumer would probably not actually think they had collaborated with OpenAI, because OpenAI does not make beer.
OP is releasing a model called “MiniGPT-4”. A reasonable consumer could look at that name and become confused about the origin of the product, thinking it was from OpenAI. This would be understandable, since OpenAI also makes large language models and has a well known one that they’ve been promoting whose brand name is “GPT-4”. If MiniGPT-4 does not meet that consumer’s expectation of quality (which has been built up through using and hearing about GPT-4) it may cause them to think something like “Wow, I guess OpenAI is going downhill”.
Trademark cases are generally decided on a “reasonable consumer” basis. So yeah, they can seem a little arbitrary. But it’s important for consumers to be able to distinguish the origin of the goods they are consuming and for creators to be able to benefit from their investment in advertising and product development.
At Brewer’s Art in Baltimore, MD they just released a beer called GPT (Green Peppercorn Tripel)[1]. They’re likely allowed to do that because a reasonable consumer would probably not actually think they had collaborated with OpenAI, because OpenAI does not make beer.
OP is releasing a model called “MiniGPT-4”. A reasonable consumer could look at that name and become confused about the origin of the product, thinking it was from OpenAI. This would be understandable, since OpenAI also makes large language models and has a well known one that they’ve been promoting whose brand name is “GPT-4”. If MiniGPT-4 does not meet that consumer’s expectation of quality (which has been built up through using and hearing about GPT-4) it may cause them to think something like “Wow, I guess OpenAI is going downhill”.
Trademark cases are generally decided on a “reasonable consumer” basis. So yeah, they can seem a little arbitrary. But it’s important for consumers to be able to distinguish the origin of the goods they are consuming and for creators to be able to benefit from their investment in advertising and product development.
[1] https://www.thebrewersart.com/bottles-cans