Did OpenAI just purchase a URL for over $10 million?

The head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, has recently made an important revision concerning the website chat.com by eliminating the foliage of the mark “GPT” from it. Previously the domain belonged to Dharmesh Shah, the co-founder and CTO of Hubspot who earlier in the year splashed out a whopping $15.5 million to acquire the domain chat.com. Upon its acquisition, Shah declared that he has disposed off the domain at a higher price than what he bought it for, thus making a gain.

The domain chat.com was acquired and used by Open AI to stimulate users into using a conversational model they had created called ChatGPT. The dropping of the ‘GPT’ part from the domain makes perfect sense within the context of the rebrand that the Open AI is undertaking. For instance, this new series of models in the named reasoning frameworks beginning with a model called O1 in the month of September this year, is also a part of their changing name attitributes, which OpenAI is entitled to. The o1 series by OpenAI is expected to be the beginning of the changes aimed at addressing the names that do not truly depict the work and aim of the company.

In another development, OpenAI reported that it had secured $6.6 billion in funding, which reflected its funding capabilities. Still, they have also been lately proposed over $10 million in cash or stock, which sounds quite modest considering how much other ai companies such as Friend, raised.

Buying “vanity domains” as they are popularly known, is not a contemporary occurrence but rather a practice that dates back to the early years of the internet. These domains are usually perceived to have interesting titles that many individuals as well as firms have the desire to pay extra it for ownership. This also illustrates the existing rivalry and worth of domain names in the cyberspace.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to follow my whatsapp channel