In one of his cryptic tweets, Sam Altman published a simple stupid web address redirecting to ChatGPT. But behind the “chat.com” domain recently acquired by the entrepreneur lies a costly story.
If you type “ chat.com» in the address bar of your browser, you will unfortunately not come across a site dedicated to our feline friends, but rather on the now very well-known ChatGPT interface, the OpenAI conversational agent has noticed The Verge .
It was Sam Altman, the father of ChatGPT, who announced this change in his own way via a laconic message onchatgpt.com”, but those in a hurry will now also be able to type “chat.com» to access the chatbot. A simple web redirection that probably cost a lot of money.
A transaction worth more than 10 million
Until about a year ago, “chat.com” was owned by Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot, a firm specializing in customer relations. On LinkedIn, the entrepreneur announced that this simple URL had cost him $10 million. But two months after having pointed the domain name to his LinkedIn profile, Dharmesh Shah resold the sesame for more than it cost him.
If at the time speculation was rife as to who the new owner of the site was, eyes quickly focused on OpenAI and Sam Altman, who is therefore the new owner. On X, the founder of HubSpot confirmed the information in a long message referring to ChatGPT.
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It therefore appears that OpenAI spent more than $10 million to acquire the chat.com domain name and link it to ChatGPT. More precisely, the transaction seems to have been formed around the sale of OpenAI shares to Dharmesh Shah. Depending on the stock price, this small transaction could therefore have brought in a colossal sum for the person responsible.
Towards a rebrand for ChatGPT?
It remains to be seen why OpenAI and Sam Altman were so keen to acquire this famous URL. Last September, a former manager of OpenAI explained toThe Vergethat the company “was bad» on product name questions. Could it be that OpenAI therefore wishes to change the identity of its conversational robot and instead give it the nickname “chat.com”?
To go further
Here is ChatGPT Search, the new OpenAI search engine that makes Google tremble
At the moment, the domain name is changing hands and landing between those of OpenAI. Only time will tell what the company wants to do with it.
