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