It can happen to anyone. You design a website with one of the best web builders and think you're ready to go only to realise that you need to pay a pretty price for a domain name. But few internet domain names cost as much as what OpenAI, the company behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT and the AI image generator DALL-E, just paid for chat.com.
The company is reported to have paid over $15 million in shares for the domain, which now redirects to, yep, ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the move in the week simply by sharing the URL in a post on X, formerly Twitter. The seller was Dharmesh Shah, the founder and CTO of HubSpot, who only bought the web address last year. He said he paid $15.5 million for it, and he sold it to OpenAI just months later.
He wrote on LinkedIn before the sale: “The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I think Chat-based UX (#ChatUX) is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers/software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by Generative A.I."
Shah said last year that he had sold the site for a profit. In a post on X last week, he clarified that he was paid in OpenAI shares (when I say clarified... he posted in the style of prompt written for ChatGPT asking the AI bot to calculate how many OpenAI shares he should be paid in exchange for the URL).
Is chat.com really worth $15 million to OpenAI? It could be, because it makes a massive difference to its branding. OpenAI already owns AI.com, which also redirects to ChatGPT. But 'Chat.com' is more human and friendly than both of those domains, and that can make the difference as the Microsoft-backed company aims to win more mainstream appeal for its chatbot.
Dropping the 'GPT' to become simple Chat, or Chat.com, would make the AI chat bot sound less arcane and more approachable. It's short, simple and unforgettable, whereas, GPT, for many people, is three randomly chosen letters. 'Chat' also references OpenAI's focus on creating a conversational UX for using generative AI while leaving enough space to create a story around the brand (see our piece on the golden rules for creating effective product names and our article on how the world's biggest brands got their names).
Meanwhile, AI controversies continue in other areas, with Coca-Cola causing surprising with its AI-generated Christmas ad.
