A simple thing like a website URL could be worth millions of dollars, yes. It all depends on the name and value in the name. This is something Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI understands which is why he had to make an investment of over $15 million just to acquire one URL.
The URL is "chat.com" and it's obvious why he would do that, he owns Chatgpt so why not just get the chat URL but I'm wondering exactly what his plan is for this URL. I've been thinking about why he would do that and my conclusion is that perhaps since they're improve the GPT models so quickly, one day it might not be pre-trained anymore so they'll eventually have to lose the GPT part of their model.
But I also think this is more than just getting a cool and simple name or removing the GPT from their name. I think Sam Altman has a new vision of making OpenAI synonymous with "chat" just like how Google today is synonymous to the word "search".
The whole story behind the domain name goes even deeper than just getting purchased recently. The guy who originally bought the domain is called Dharmesh Shah and I'm not certain of the exact amount of money but from my research, he paid 8-figure-sum to get that particular URL. He did that because he was a visionary who believed that chat based technology will be a big industry in the future and he was not wrong at all.
We've been having chats on social media and instant Messengers, I believe the next big thing is chat with AI. Besides chatting with AI is the only way to get it to perform tasks for you so we're already seeing a lot of chats with AI these days.
So I see Altman as a very smart man for making this purchase, AI chat might soon be the primary way to interact online.
