A recent post from ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman has suggested big things are coming for the chatbot.
AI chatbots have been making headlines consistently since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. Whether it's giving us scarily realistic images of what our future on Earth might look like, or being unable to spell 'Strawberry' correctly. More recently, the chatbot CharacterAI came under fire after after one of it's users, a 14-year-old boy, died after forming a romantic relationship with a bot based off of a Game of Thrones character.
A recent post on X from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has shown that the domain of 'chat.com' now redirects to ChatGPT - the company's leading generative artificial intelligence chatbot that has soared in popularity since its launch in 2022.
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While perhaps seemingly clunky at first, the name 'ChatGPT' has become both immediately recognisable and innately linked with AI, to the point where if most people think of AI, they think of ChatGPT.
This new domain could perhaps signal that OpenAI are prepared to ditch the 'GPT' aspect in favour of a more simplistic moniker, even though at the moment it's just a URL redirect.
People have taken to social media to speculate on this potential rebrand, with users on the r/singularity subreddit split on whether the simplified name will be embraced by OpenAI.
One user remarks that they're "pretty sure a rebrand would be if ChatGPT redirected to chat.com," theorising that "this just looks more like a shortcut thing." That certainly makes sense, as the initial domain has been preserved in this instance, but as one reply remarks, this would be a "15.5 million dollar shortcut."
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There's definitely some sense to the name change though. An argument from one commenter is that "it is definitely easier to say 'I just chatted that' than 'I just ChatGPTed that." With the prevalence of 'Googled' as a verb nowadays, it's hard to deny the power of a catchy name when it comes to spreading your brand.
It's also hard to not see a situation where people wouldn't keep calling it ChatGPT though, as is the case with Twitter following it's rebrand to X in July 2023. Someone else in the thread argues that OpenAI can't rebrand to a 'common' English word, as they'll lost "basically all control of their brand." It'd be hard to copyright a word as widely used as 'chat' after all.
It appears as if OpenAI obtained the 'chat.com' domain from HubSpot's Dharmesh Shah for over $15 million, although this appears to have happened all the way back in May 2023.
$15 million is certainly a lot of money to spend on something you don't plan on using beyond a simple redirected URL, and the fact that this has potentially been in the works for a year and a half could indicate that something much bigger is coming for ChatGPT and OpenAI as a whole.
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Whether this is a widescale rebrand or something far beyond that is still yet to be seen, but it's definitely got the AI community speculating and theorising. Who knows, maybe it's worth asking ChatGPT what it thinks about all of this.