OpenAI has bought the domain chat.com. Clicking on it automatically routes you to the ChatGPT website. The AI giant’s CEO Sam Altman announced this on Thursday, November 7, 2024, by simply posting the URL on X (Formerly Twitter) without any description or reasoning. Altman’s post has already gotten over 3 million views and nearly 15k likes. The domain purchase is likely part of a rebranding effort.
The domain’s previous owner turned out to be Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of software company HubSpot. Shah announced this in posts on X and LinkedIn.
In his post, he detailed how he had purchased the domain for $15.5 million earlier this year and sold it later to an undisclosed (at that time) buyer.
“Well, in an 8 character tweet (talk about brevity), Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI revealed that they were the buyer,” he wrote. ”If you visit the website now, it goes to ChatGPT.” Shah wrote he was not at liberty at that time to share who the acquirer was as he was “going to leave that to them, when they were ready.”
He then went on to share GPT o1 prompt which reasoned the entire episode. “When he does sell a domain, it’s almost never at a loss,” and “Dharmesh doesn’t like profiting off of people he considers friends,” the prompt read, which could mean he did sell it for more than the $15.5 million he bought it for, since it also says he doesn’t like referring to himself in the third person.
However, its also indicated he got compensated in OpenAI shares since the prompt reads that he “always wanted to own OpenAI shares,” that “he doesn’t need the cash from a domain sale,” and that “he made a non-humble brag earlier this year that he’s now an investor in OpenAI.”