OpenAI has purchased the URL of a website that used to be a adult video chat site for more than $15,000,000

You'll be redirected from chat.com to chatgpt.com where you can chat with OpenAI's LLM bots. The Verge noticed that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had tweeted (or rather "X'd")? The URL for chat.com was all that was available, possibly because the redirect just went live.

HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah purchased the URL in 2023 for $15,5 million. According to Wikipedia's list of the most valuable domains, this is the third most expensive website URL after voice.com.com and 360.com. Shah confirmed last year that he sold it for more money than he paid, so we can deduce that OpenAI purchased it for more $15,500,000.

We don't exactly know how much more than this URL sold for. Shah does not give us an exact figure but he gives us a detailed request for GPT o1, which asks it to give an "approximate" range. He says that the model "does really well in reasoning through."

I entered this prompt into ChatGPT, and it gave me a domain price between $20 million and $25 million. Of this, 50% to 70% were OpenAI shares.

It's a versatile and catchy URL, so it's not surprising that it's selling for a lot. According to snapshots taken as recently as 2019 of the website, the URL chat.com used to link to an adult video chat and chat room website. How much of the Internet do they claim is pornographic?

Shah confirmed that OpenAI purchased the URL chat.com when he said, "the secret acquirer of the $15+ million domain [chat.com] [is] revealed. It's exactly who'd expect."

What other major player could you think of who would be so keen to use the word "chat" as part of its branding? OpenAI's ChatGPT models are the only company that can be considered synonymous with "chat", however broad that term may be.

If you're wondering what a non-profit company cares so much about brand, don't. OpenAI's desire to become for-profit is no longer a secret, but rather a known fact. Only a few weeks ago, the company began to discuss the possibility with California's attorney general's offices.

I'm a bit skeptical about recent claims that ChatGPT has alreadydone much of this rebranding. The Chat/ChatGPT site and model selector say ChatGPT not "OpenAI Chat", or even "Chat". I'm also unsure if it would be beneficial to change the branding. "ChatGPT", after all, is so ubiquitous that it seems like a waste.

If AI chat does indeed become the new standard for interacting with all of our tech, then it might be a good idea to shift towards a more generic branding in the long run.