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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

TIL openai owns chat.com

I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.

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I've seen people using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT because it's easier/simpler. I'm pretty sure an average person has no idea that chat.com will redirect you to chatgpt.com (or what a redirect is for that matter). It's similar to how people were calling the COVID-19 pandemic or the virus itself "covid".

people in the industry, especially those who work for oai, refer to it as "chat"

at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex

I've heard it as shorthand, in-context. Never heard it being chat-as-in-kleenex. I've supposedly been in the industry since before ChatGPT. Maybe that's where I went wrong :D

Guess I'm not in the industry enough lmao

ChatGPT is commonly referred to as Chappie (チャッピー) in Japan.

I’ve heard people call Gemini as Cemile (Jamila), and ChatGPT as Chipitty in Turkey.

Many of my non tech friends would call it Chatty! Tbh I like it better than ChatGPT

Some older folks I know call it Chat Jippity non-ironically

Chat Jippity.

I just say jippity or sometimes "the jippity"

I've heard in my home country Geppetto for ChatGPT. I'm not sure if it's still a popular term there.

I’ve heard this recently too.

It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.

I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.

It's not confusing so much as it is genius marketing. They're hooking into a relatively widespread slang word and turning it into their product.

Are you sure they were using "chat" to refer to ChatGPT? I have noticed many kids now use chat to refer to the collective audience/chat participants, and then gets used rhetorically even when no literal chatroom exists. A streamer says things like “Chat, what do you think?” or “Chat, are we cooked?” That usage has spread well beyond literal livestream chats, particularly among younger people.

The streamer is talking to the people in the stream’s chat room. Every streamer refers to all the people in the chat room as “Chat”. Kids these days use the same collective noun for everyone in their group chat.

Vtubers often have a specific name for the people watching the stream, based on their own back story + usually also some word play.

This has been a thing well before chat.com even among engineers at our company.

Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.

Dhamesh Shah (Hubspot founder) grabbed chat.com and then in late 2024 sold to openai

https://x.com/dharmesh/status/1854307883304792294

I've heard people affectionately call ChatGPT 'chatty'

Surely the way streamers talk to "chat"? I've never heard anyone call ChatGPT "chat".

No, there are people who will say "ask Chat to explain it to you" in reference to ChatGPT.

All the people younger than 28yo in France, for sure.

That could be because to say ChatGPT in French sounds like "Chat I farted" (Chat j'ai pété)

isn't chat a cat in france

Just redirects to chatgpt.com

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