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by paulgb 1148 days ago
I believe aviators have been using it longer.
1 comments

Indeed, but under trademark law, the context-of-use matters, and is what allows generic terms from one domain – like 'copilot', 'apple', 'slack', 'y combinator' – to become defensible trademarks in another commercial-offerings domain.

From this landing page's headline & 1st paragraph, I was still thinking they were talking about the broader-market, better-known Github Copilot – also a for-pay LLM-driven coding assistant! – in some way. In the 2nd paragraph, I saw they were just reusing the name of someone else's LLM coding assistant for something different that they independently trained.

Note also the current submission headline here is "ChatGPT for Hardware Design", not the page's "AI For Hardware Design with Copilot".

Did the submitter not use the usually-requested original page title, because they knew `Copilot` would be misunderstood? (They created another misunderstanding via their change: ChatGPT is only an analogy for what Flux.ai's product is doing, rather than a contributing part of the system.)

If they aren't using ChatGPT in Flux.ai, that's textbook trademark misuse!

Check out my new product -- It's Windows for Raspberry Pi! (Actually a Ubuntu port)

Their page doesn't mention 'ChatGPT' - that analogy was added by the submitter. But, Flux.ai has named their LLM-based coding assistant 'Copilot'.