OpenAI has bought Chat.com
Anyone visiting chat.com is redirected to ChatGPT. OpenAI bought the domain –. It is not known how much it cost.
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Chat.com now redirects to ChatGPT. The domain has been purchased by OpenAI, as has now been announced. This is an old and, above all, expensive domain. It is not known exactly what OpenAI plans to do with it. A permanent renaming of the AI chatbot to the short title Chat is unlikely. Nevertheless, the address fits in extremely well if the company wants to become the largest and most important chatbot provider in the world.
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Chat.com was registered back in 1996. Last year, HubSpot co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah, is said to have bought chat.com for 15.5 million US dollars. As TechCrunch reports, this was one of the most expensive known sales of a domain. Shat declared last March that he had already sold the domain again to an undisclosed buyer. He has now confirmed in a post on X that this was OpenAI. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, also referred to chat.com – in an X post without any further explanation. The redirect has been working since at least yesterday, November 6, 2024.
Shah indirectly revealed in his post that he was paid primarily in OpenAI shares. To this end, he wrote a fictitious prompt for o1-Preview. This is the latest AI model from OpenAI. When asked what GPT-o1 thinks he got for the domain, he explains, among other things, his love for the company, his closeness to Sam Altman and that he is in such a good financial position that he doesn't need any money. At the end, he even splits the question into two parts; how many shares and how much money he probably got. Of course, a chatbot's answer can vary and is not really meaningful.
The – most expensive domain as far as is known – has been sold several times for several million US dollars: in 2006 for 12.5 million, in 2010 it is said to have been 13 million US dollars and thus an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. It was Sex.com. An online auction in 2001 led to expectations of as much as 85 million US dollars, but apparently nothing came of it. Instead, CarInsurance.com is said to have fetched almost 50 million US dollars, followed by Insurance with around 35.6 million US dollars.
(emw)
