Go to chat.com and you will notice that you have been redirected to chatgpt.com, where you can chat with one of OpenAI’s LLM chatbots. This was brought to the attention of The Verge. after noticing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on Twitter (or should I say “X’d”?) only the chat.com URL, probably because the redirect has just been triggered.
The previous owner of the URL was HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah, who purchased it in 2023 for $15.5 million. According to A List of the most high-priced domains on Wikipediait is the third most high-priced URL on the Internet, after Voice.com and 360.com. Last year, Shah confirmed he sold the URL for more than he paid for it, so we can deduce that OpenAI bought it for over $15,500,000.
BREAKING NEWS: The mystery buyer of the chat .com domain worth over $15 million has been revealed, and that’s exactly what you’d think. Those of you who have been following me for a while may remember that earlier this year I announced that I had acquired the .com chat domain for an “8-figure sum”… https://t.co/nv1IyddP5zNovember 6, 2024
We don’t know exactly how much higher than this number the URL sold. But while Shah doesn’t give us a number, he does give us detailed guidance on GPT o1, asking for a “rough range” that he believes the model “is really good at reasoning about.”
I put this prompt into ChatGPT and it came up with a sale price of $20 to $25 million for the domain, with 50% to 70% of that being OpenAI equity.
This is obviously a catchy and versatile URL, so the fact that it comes at a high cost isn’t too surprising. At least according to some archived snapshots of the site as recently as 2019, the chat.com URL led to an adult video cam and chat room site. (Again, how much of the Internet do they think is pornographic?)
It’s “exactly what you think” because, well, what other major player can you think of that would be as keen on using “chat” in their branding? If there is one company that could become synonymous with “chat” branding as broad as this term is, it is OpenAI with its ChatGPT models.
And if you’re wondering why a nonprofit company cares so much about branding: don’t. It’s not so much an open secret anymore, but the fact that OpenAI is trying to make a profit. Just a few days ago, the company started discussions about this possibility with California Attorney General’s Office.
I’m a bit skeptical of the recent talk of having ChatGPT Already however, I’ve done quite a bit of this rebranding given that the Chat/ChatGPT site and model selector still say ChatGPT and not “OpenAI Chat” or just “Chat”. Plus, “ChatGPT” is such a ubiquitous name these days that I wonder how beneficial it would be to move away from the branding.
On the other hand, if AI-powered chat truly becomes the recent standard for communicating with all of our technology, it may make sense in the long run to move to more generic branding.
