OpenAI has bought the URL of what used to be an adult video chat website for more than $15,500,000
Head over to chat.com and you'll notice you're redirected to chatgpt.com, where you can talk with one of OpenAI's LLM chatbots. The Verge pointed this out after noticing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Tweeted (or rather, «X'd»?) just the chat.com URL, presumably because the redirect had just gone live.
The previous owner of the URL was HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah who purchased it in 2023 for $15.5 million. According to a Wikipedia list of the most expensive domains, it's the third most expensive URL on the internet, after voice.com and 360.com. Last year, Shah confirmed he sold the URL for more than he paid for it, so we can infer that OpenAI bought it for more than $15,500,000.
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/nv1IyddP5zNovember 6, 2024
We don't know exactly how much higher than this number the URL sold for. But while Shah doesn't give us a figure, he does give us a detailed prompt for GPT o1, asking for it to provide an «approximate range», which he says the model «does a really good job of reasoning through.»
I put this prompt into ChatGPT and it came up with a domain sale price of $20 million to $25 million, with 50% to 70% of this being OpenAI shares.
It's a catchy and versatile URL, of course, so that it's going for a lot of cash isn't too surprising. At least according to some archived snapshots of the website from as recently as 2019, the chat.com URL used to lead to an adult video cam and chat room website. (How much of the internet do they say is pornographic, again?)
Shah's confirmation that OpenAI was the company to purchase the chat.com URL came when he said the «secret acquirer of [the] $15+ million domain chat.com [is] revealed and it's exactly who you'd think.»
It's «exactly who you'd think» because,
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