ChatGPT has just paid a reported 15.5 million dollars for the URL chat.com, making it easier to get to ChaGPT. Now when you type Chat.com into your browser you’ll be redirected to ChatGPT.com. The move sparks rumors that the ChatGPT chatbot and search engine could be about to undergo a rebrand so it is better able to compete with rivals like Google.
The redirect was announced on X.com on Wednesday when Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted a tweet containing just the URL, chat.com.
The announcement prompted immediate speculation from X.com users about whether OpenAI was going to drop the “GPT” part of the name altogether.
The chat.com domain was previously owned by Dharmesh Shah, the founder and CTO of HubSpot, who claimed in a LinkedIn post to have paid $10 million for it in 2023, but had sold it a couple of months later for “more than I paid for it”. At the time he said, “I’m not at liberty to disclose details on who the purchaser was or the price paid. Sorry.”
What’s in a name?
It’s easy to forget how new the generative AI field is. As with any emerging field of technology, brand names tend to come and go quite quickly. Google started by calling its AI Bard, but this was dropped in favor of Gemini. Recently there has been speculation that Microsoft is not happy with its Copilot AI name, and is considering “Windows Intelligence”. The move would be perhaps seen as a little too close to what Apple is doing with Apple Intelligence.
The GPT part of ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-training Transformer and refers to the type of large language model (LLM) that uses the transformer architecture but is hardly a brilliant brand name. The URL chat.com is much more memorable, and as Sharmesh Shah said when he originally purchased the URL “chat.com is absolutely brilliant in terms of simplicity, shortness and being totally *on point* and meeting the moment. It immediately creates user trust. Somebody (not me) will build a massively successful product/company on it.”
OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently launched the equally cumbersomely-named AI search engine, ChatGPT search, despite owning the much more catchy URL, SearchGPT. In September the company announced that it would be releasing a new series of LLMs starting with “o1”, which recently saw the light of day, just for a few short hours, by mistake.
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