OpenAI spends more than $15 million on one of the oldest domains on the internet

“The reason I bought chat.com is simple: I believe the chat-based user experience is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers through a natural language interface is much more intuitive,” Shah wrote to announce his acquisition.

However, after two months he announced that he had sold chat.com and although he did not give exact figures of how much he had charged for the transaction, this week he confirmed that he received more money than he had originally paid.

“The buyer of the chat.com domain is revealed for more than $15 million and he is exactly who you would expect,” Shah commented in response to Altman’s post where he put the URL.

Although Shah did not give more details about the transaction, in his publication he suggested that the company did not pay him cash for the domain, but that it was an operation that involved company shares instead of money.

OpenAI on the way to a name change for its chatbot

This measure by the most important AI company currently is not coincidental, since it is aligned with the intention of changing the name of the popular chatbot and eliminating the GPT suffix from the product.

Last September, the firm’s former research director, Bob McGrew, said that the new series of models would have the last name “o1” as a first step towards changing the names to “newer, more sensible” ones in order to better communicate the company’s work.

Although it may seem like a superfluous expense, around $15 million seems to have no impact on a company that last month established itself as one of the most valuable private companies in the world ($157 billion), by raising $6.6 billion. dollars

This funding round attracted venture capital investors such as Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures, as well as OpenAI’s largest corporate backer, Microsoft, and new participation from Nvidia.