OpenAI bought the domain ai.com for $11M | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI bought the domain ai.com for $11M

warpcast.com

67 pointsbreck70 comments

This suggests OpenAI has peaked and will begin its slow fade to irrelevancy. Ai.com Superbowl ad next year will really seal the deal.

OpenAI has raised $11 billion. $11 million is a drop in the bucket for them if it gets them more customers, more job applicants, etc.

As it stands, its 3000 drops in a 3 gallon bucket.

I think it would actually be 227 drops in a 3 gallon bucket. However it's important to consider that it would be a mere 19 drops in a 1 quart pail. (based on 75k drops per gallon)

From the way you added "However it's important to consider" at the end of your answer, i believe you used chatgpt3 to write that.

Just trying to be funny

So there are around 15k drops per gallon. So a drop in a 3 gallon bucket would be 1/45,000th. That would make this approximately 45 drops in the bucket. I hope this data helps inform the discussion about the URL.

It's 4 months out of 348 years.

It’s 11 million bananas out of 11 billion bananas

I wonder if they're looking to hire the kinds of people for whom having a vanity domain name like that would be a major deciding factor.

A substantial part of the bucket is filled with azure credits, rather than anything liquid (groan)

Also, "we have so much money that we don't even need to think about the value we're getting by spending this $11M" is exactly the kind of thinking that leads to an inevitable fade into irrelevancy.

About 500M is in the form of Azure credits. Those Azure credits should be as good as cash to OpenAI given that they are in the business of training AI models.

Tesla paid 11M for tesla.com. Apple paid 6M for iCloud.com. They are still doing fine. And if either fails, it won't be because they bought domain names.

That could also be like saying back in 2005 that thefacebook.com must have peaked because they bought Facebook.com for what was then considered a large sum of money…

So what was the year when Facebook peaked, in your opinion?

Not sure but it definitely was not 2005

on HN, you could be asking this question to a student, a worker, a VC or a stock analyst. They'll all have a different answer.

I think the giveaway is the generic domain name. If Facebook bought socialmedia.com it would be a good bet they peaked.

I doubt it; I know more people thinking about buying a subscription to chatgpt now than back when Netflix was released here in Germany. They would have to truly mess up to lose the incumbent advantage now, especially considering that the whole current business seems to be about scale and fundamental advancements aren't copyrighted.

Cf. C. Northcote Parkinson’s essay ‘Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block.’

Is there a list somewhere with domain transactions > $10M? Curious to get a feel for the (subjective) value. There is probably a correlation in price with number of characters, vowels, etc.

I know during the dot com bubble some names sold for very large amounts, and there have been other cases recently (Facebook bought meta.com)

Other than a small portion, people might be surprised how LITTLE domain names go for; I was involved in the purchase of a three character domain on one of the original TLDs that was only in the $5k range.

5k is still an outrageous amount of money for a domain name...

5k is a steal for a good name.

Is it? does the .com really matter now as it did 20 years ago?

If you can afford $1m for a domain name, you can afford to advertise your site on search queries that specifically name your competitors.

If I see a link for a corporate site whose domain is not {company-name-or-abbreviation}.com I assume it's phishing spam.

Supply and demand. A three-character .com/.net/.org domain name going for $5k is a pretty good deal in my book.

> outrageous amount

Squatters have a pretty strong HODL game, often lasting several years because it only costs $10/year for them.

That's why I don't think squatting should be allowed. For company name, you can't just create thousand companies and resell their names. Domain squatting brings no value to society

We should start one.

I know crypto.com was purchased for $12M in 2018

I just checked: crypto.com was also registered back in 1993. Who TF thought or knew about it when even the internet was in infancy?

cryptography (the original "crypto") has been a thing for awhile

Not the most up to date I believe but there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_...

The top of that list is voice.com for $30mm, which is apparently an NFT art marketplace. The top-selling artist of all time has sold $100k worth of NFTs. The top-selling artist in the past 30 days has sold $425. Ouch. I do not think they made back their investment on that domain.

Had to check that out and you're absolutely right but you missed out that the top selling artist of all time is actor John Cusack. For some reason that's bamboozling me.

https://www.voice.com/johncusack

https://twitter.com/johncusack/status/1478052897388732429?la...

No matter how many TLDs are created, .com is what matters.

NameBio.com is a database that includes both wholesale and retail domain name sales.

Yes, there is a correlation between number of characters and price. There are many other correlations as well.

$11 million is not a confirmed number.

The company who brokered a prior trade of ai.com in 2021 said the asking price was $11m, but that they are not going to share the final price of that prior transaction.

But, I have not been able to find any information about the price of this most recent sale of the name.

Damn. I bought rl.ai when I was a grad student but it's been laying fallow since I can't really blog about the stuff I'm working on right now. How does one go about selling their domain for millions of dollars?

rl.ai is probably not so valuable. Everyone now knows the word "AI," but only specialists know "RL"

What’s RL? “Real life” is the only thing that comes to mind.

reinforcment learning

Exactly. That is why it is probably not valuable.

Ok, thanks.

Short names on these popular country TLDs are probably not as valuable as they might seem.

I used to own a NN.io domain name where NN was a common financial abbreviation. I thought it might be fairly valuable, but I ended up selling at auction for less than $3k. (That was before the crypto boom. Maybe it could have fetched more if I’d waited several years and sold in 2021. It seems like there was a short moment when even relatively crap .xyz domains sold for five figures.)

I was betting on 'roguelike'

Which is a bit surprising, given that RL is the most likely path to the scary AI future everyone loves to blog about.

Doesn't surprise me. Maybe you've heard of low temperature heat pumps, but not the refrigerants that enabled that technology. You've certainly heard about solar panels but you probably don't know what metallurgical and manufacturing advances made them cheap enough for many people to buy.

Why should someone learn technical jargon when what there interested in is what effects the technology will have on society?

Dan, Sedo, Afternic

> How does one go about selling their domain for millions of dollars?

You have a domain someone wants to buy for millions of dollars

One aspect of a profit capped company is that as they start to make more and more revenue (and profit) they’ll be heavily incentivized to just invest it all back into employees or datacenters or 8 figure domain names since the for company can’t keep the extra profit anyways.

It says the profits are capped at 100x of any investment and it is also known that MSFT invested $10B. So looks like they have some headroom before needing such accounting?

The cap goes down as the company gets bigger and bigger, I doubt Microsoft is at the 100x number.

But regardless of what exactly the cap is, it creates an incentive for the company to operate as close to 0 profit as possible because there is much less incentive for excess profit… they don’t get to keep it. But they do get to keep anything that is a reasonable business expense.

How many companies ever has paid out a total of 1 trillion dollars? I don't think any current companies has.

Rebranding soon? Would be quite apt since they aren't "open" anymore.

There is nothing credible to indicate that it actually sold for $11m that was apparently the asking price. It could have sold for more it could have sold for vastly less.

https://domaininvesting.com/ai-com-forwarding-chatgpt/

Do people even see domain names anymore with browsers so minimal and everyone using "apps"

Do they even type them in anymore?

They certainly can't brand "AI" since even just paying that much for it as a domain demonstrates it can't be trademarked or it would have been a $3000 UDRP

They could brand themself as “ai.com”

Owning a given .com seems to instill a sense of authority on the matter for branding purposes. I don't think it has the same effect like back in the 90's where people may have just guessed at domain names to find something in lieu of a search engine, or like AOL Keywords, but they still do have a bit of prestige and seem to signal some kind of trust on the matter to most.

That being said, nowadays it just doesn't end at a generic TLD, and just by way of owning ai.com they are not going (or expecting) to suddenly see huge influxes of users and traffic... but used in conjunction with ad spots that call out ai.com it's a lot easier to start positioning that authority.

It was registered way back in 1993. So not feeling bad now about losing the big bucks on it. Interestingly, it was registered via Google domains :-)

https://www.whois.com/whois/ai.com

It was obviously not registered via Google domains. They're just the current registrar. Back in 1993 it was almost certainly registered with Network Solutions.

Google domains didnt exist in 1993, lol. They're probably the current registar.

Qualcomm appears to have the relevant "AI" trademark: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=97713612&caseType=SERIAL_...

FYI: You can't share TESS links that way. They don't work.

Annoying - updated to alternative link with disclaimer that it appears to require JS, thanks.

They bought ai.com and have it redirecting to chat.openai.com, but as far as I can tell they don't own chatgpt.com? There must be a lot of people hearing about chatgpt and trying that address

Whoa, cool to see Warpcast on the front page of HN

Something weird: ai.org redirects to in.gov. I wonder if the Indiana state government knows they own that domain...

They did not. AI.com redirects to a-i.com.

This may have been a publicity stunt by the owner to get traffic.

I've just tried it and it opened openai's chatgpt

Damn, I let em.com go by accident way back in the early 90's.

Making good use of that Microsoft dollar I see.

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