OpenAI spent $10M on chat.com URL
36 points by segasaturn 15 hours ago | 20 comments
  • ChrisArchitect 15 hours ago |
  • echoangle 14 hours ago |
    Correction for the title:

    They spent more than $15.5 million, according to the article

  • red2awn 14 hours ago |
    "Chat (formerly ChatGPT)"
    • JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago |
      Deprecating ChatGPT as a brand would be the stupidest marketing decision since New Coke.
      • xp84 11 hours ago |
        Yes, but not for the same reason. IMHO the stupid part would be because they can't get a trademark on a completely generic term, so 1000 competitors and knockoffs would be diluting their brand equity and SEO.
      • burgerrito 4 hours ago |
        Wait until you found out about X
  • blitzar 13 hours ago |
    Naming rights for a stadium up next surely?
    • xp84 11 hours ago |
      Yeah what did they do with that FTX stadium? :D
  • uses 12 hours ago |
    Someone educated me on this type of thing a while back. Chat.com - and other highly reusable URLs - is a non-deteriorating asset that has a value on OpenAI's ledger somewhere. It's not like they bought $10,000,000 worth of catering or fuel or labor even buildings. Because someday, the owning entity can sell it for about what they spent on it. And I imagine there is some kind of financial instrument to take out a loan with the domain as collateral. My point is, it's not really like they "spent" the money as much as they just parked it in a domain name.
    • paulddraper 11 hours ago |
      They definitely bought it.

      Though you are correct it is a durable asset. (As are buildings.)

    • solarkraft 11 hours ago |
      That it keeps its value is a huge assumption.
      • xp84 11 hours ago |
        GP said highly reusable URLs. Roughly by definition, it's enduringly desirable. It is valuable in a way that say, Kmart dot com is not, since it has an open-ended set of uses. I chose the Kmart example because that domain is associated with a specific brand that's universally known to be irrelevant, which caps its value to whatever cash one could make "redirect to affiliate links" generate with random legacy traffic it gets. You wouldn't use it for a dating site, or even for a grocery delivery startup.

        A 'temporarily reusable' tier might be something like "DVD dot com" or "rtx dot com" or something -- presumably there's a lot less money in DVD than there was 20 years ago, and presumably raytracing won't be an exciting high-end thing people are excited about 20 years from now. They're valuable and quite reusable at one point, but could become low-value by the time the company decides to unload them.

        • sigmoid10 4 hours ago |
          I'd say any single syllable common english word .com url has a high intrinsic value that will not go down unless english stops being the de facto lingua franca of the internet.
      • sirspacey 10 hours ago |
        A four letter doc com that has become the verb for AI.

        Not that huge.

      • whalesalad 7 hours ago |
        Four letter English word, .com tld, it will certainly hold its value.
  • pixelsort 12 hours ago |
    Could I get 1% as much for snugchat.com? Tempting, but I think I'd still rather build it out; especially now.
  • tester756 11 hours ago |
    I do wonder what the RoI is here

    15M is like one month of salaries for 500 engineers, so like 40% of their whole eng. team

  • mpaepper 11 hours ago |
    On X it was mentioned that the seller received part of the compensation in OpenAI stock.
  • kyawzazaw 10 hours ago |
    definitely more than that
  • rcxdude 2 hours ago |
    shades of .com bubble