Sam AltmanCEO of OpenAImade a really brief publication on X this Wednesday. Just one domain: chat.com. When you click on it from a browser, chat.com redirects to chatgpt.comthe web address that the most popular chatbot has used since its launch in November 2022. That a service of the popularity of ChatGPT Starting to use a new domain is not common, nor is the amount that OpenAI is estimated to have paid for it: more than 15 million dollars.
https://t.co/n494J9IuEN
—Sam Altman (@sama) November 6, 2024
The founder and CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shahbought chat.com, first registered in 1996, in early 2023 for $15.5 million, according to The Verge. Shah sold the domain to OpenAI for an undisclosed amount, although he confirmed on X that ‘he doesn’t like to benefit from people he considers friends’ and that he was paid, to some extent, in company stock by revealing that he ‘is now an investor in OpenAI.’
Shah bought the domain to promote the conversational interfaces. ‘The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I believe that chat-based user experience (#ChatUX) It’s 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 AI,’ Shah wrote in a LinkedIn post while he owned the domain.
The millionaire of Indian origin has confirmed that OpenAI was the buyer of chat.com after Altman’s publication. And although he has not revealed the figure, Yes, it has left a prompt to use with ChatGPT, with the o1 Preview language model, the latest one launched by the company and, apparently, reveal it.
BREAKING NEWS: Secret acquirer of $15+ million domain chat .com revealed and it’s exactly who you’d think.
For those of you that have been following me for a while, you may recall that I announced earlier this year that I had acquired the domain chat .com for an “8 figure sum”… https://t.co/nv1IyddP5z
— dharmesh (@dharmesh) November 6, 2024
Using it, the result that the AI calculates is an amount of between 15 and 15.5 million dollars. Of this amount, the percentage of OpenAI shares received by Shah would range between 75 and 100%.
On the other hand, if the prompt is used with GPT-4o instead of with the language model indicated by Shah, the result is very different. The estimated sales price paid by OpenAI would be in this case between 20 and 30 million dollarsbeing between 50 and 75% the percentage of that value delivered in shares.
Although these figures are dizzying for the average user, the truth is that it is very little for a company that has been the darling of the technology industry for a couple of years and that recently closed a new round of financing for $6 billion.
Altman did not detail specific plans for the domain, but hopefully over time the chatbot is migrated to chat.com and chatgpt.com is the domain that redirects to the previous one. Until everyone associates ChatGPT with chat.com.