That seems like a very weird branding move to me (dropping the part of your brand name that actually makes it recognizable), but I guess I just don't understand the marketing 4D chess at play here.
Is this some kind of marketing flex? "We are so recognizable, we can afford drop the only thing from our name that makes it make object level sense"?
Other examples: Transferwise -> Wise (despite them still doing transfers as their main business), WeWork -> We (ok, to be fair in my experience not so much work got done there at the best of times) etc.
These things also usually completely kill SEO. Like, how am I supposed to google for the nearest coworking space? "we near me" sounds ridiculous to type into a search engine.
Transferwise makes sense to me. They used to be just about transferring money abroad. By now, they offer full bank accounts including card payments. I guess they dropped the transfer to make people aware that they’re a proper bank now.
I don't get why he didn't rebrand it as "twitter on X", X encompassing the chatbot, job search, group voice calls, etc and "twitter" being an "app" on X
Not the same as Alphabet is the parent company and media do call it so when the parent company is fined for example. Same for Meta. Also, the press does write "X" or "X (formerly Twitter").
Not exactly. I was saying Twitter should be the product, X should be the platform. The current situation would be as if Google renamed Youtube to Google
It’s because X was supposed to become a one app to rule them all like WeChat in China, and that obviously never happened (maybe because he fired everyone?), instead X is just Elon’s personal Twitter.
It's sad but it might eventually. I would imagine to the end of Trump cadence we'll be paying with x-coin in supermarkets, both he and Elon will be making tons of money. Trumps and Elons x-coin will have tariffs built in to it and you won't be paying taxes if you use it /s
There was HBO Go and HBO Now, one of which you could subscribe to yourself, the other of which was an option you could get through your cable provider. There was massive amounts of confusion about the entire situation.
HBO Max was combining the two apps into a single digital streaming platform.
I guess short words are cooler and more expensive. Like Facebook starting as www.thefacebook.com and then getting facebook.com later. Not sure how meta.com is working out for them though. I guess the stock is up.
Meta is a company though, not (primarily) a brand. People don't need to google or remember "Meta"; they'll search for "WhatsApp", "Instagram" etc. (In fact, I suspect that getting as far away in semantic space from Facebook with these other properties was part of the motivation for the rename.)
If OpenAI renamed itself to just "AI" I'd sigh and shrug (and applaud the honesty), but ChatGPT is a product and well-known brand name.
Are they? Have you tried Gemini lately? They might be competing on the services side, but the only two peer competitors in the chatbot space are Anthropic and OpenAI.
They do have a chat ui. It's not as robust afaik, but I don't see why they can't expand on it. It would be a nice addition to their storage/Google one offering
I think they're suggesting that highly popular sites like ChatGPT get a ranking boost beyond regular page rank, making SEO efforts unnecessary.
But I don’t think that’s the case, at least not artificially. These sites tend to rise naturally in search rankings because they have a huge volume of links and media coverage. Which still makes SEO efforts unnecessary.
They could also be banking on the emergence of "chat" as an imaginary external party to a conversation which apparently has started becoming a thing with _the youths_
- Chat, is this real?
- GPT, Being intentionally obtuse: Nah dude, chill
I still think Cortana was the best naming/branding. It's sufficiently unique, has a fun history, probably has enough syllables for voice activation, is an actual name that doesn't sound dumb to call an entity. Too bad MS squandered it.
Every time I go to chatgpt.com I type chat into the address bar and it autocompletes to the correct site. Also when talking to my coworkers it's taken the same status as "googling" something. We just call it "chat". So yes, I also feel it's odd to see chat.com go to chatgpt but it's the shorthand some people are already using.
Examples of what my coworkers and I say at the office:
"What does chat have to say about x?"
"Did you ask chat"
"Did chat find the answer?"
"Yeah, chat scripted that one."
Yeah, me too. And if you squint your eyes and tilt your head you can kind of make the connection. Any large Language Model is made of the "chat" from billions of messages floating around on the internet.
So when you ask chat a question you are in reality asking an algorithmic simulation of mass internet communication.
In my mind the connection works, which is convenient with the new chat.com domain and all...
Kind of funny, because there's another product we use that's just called Chat, so we'd never say that. "GPT" is a better shorthand IMO. It's also not specific but I don't know of any other product that uses it in the branding.
I kinda feel like the sort of kiki weird odd name of chatgpt helped it gain traction. People care way less about pleasurable brand names than marketing people think. Just 'chat' is way too generic etc (sounds like many unoriginal SF companies)
Sure, but there are countries where the accent of people speaking English makes the pun very obvious. I wonder if the original WhatsApp people were foreigners.
An sizeable number of people get confused and call it "ChatGTP": enough that you can search "ChatGTP" and find pages of posts and articles misnaming it
An initialism is not exactly an amazing name for a consumer product.
ChatGPT's name was always an albatross: OpenAI didn't expect the original ChatGPT research demo in November 2022 to go as megaviral as it did, but once it did it was too late to give it a more business-friendly name.
It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually rebrand ChatGPT to just Chat, Justin-Timberlake-style.
I think it reached "so bad it's good" status. If they had launched with a more typical silicon valley name like Gemini then I don't think it would have become the generic term for a chatbot among non-tech people.
Most people have no idea what GPT means or what GPT products existed before ChatGPT. But that means those 3 letters occupy their own space in their head and that space is the same as "AI chatbot". That gives OpenAI a lot of power that Anthropic won't have with "Claude" or Google with "Gemini".
It looks like Chat.com is just redirecting to ChatGPT.com and hasn't replaced the brand name (yet.)
If the intention is to rebrand as Chat.com / Chat, the interesting question is whether this commits them to the chatbot-based model of using AI tools. Personally, I think that is something of a mistake – the chat model is fine for now, but it requires too much pre-knowledge to use effectively. The most effective AI tools I've used have more elaborate UIs that help "corral" the created material into more usable formats.
If they're moving to drop GPT, I'll miss "chat gippity". I don't think I'll stop referring to OpenAI's chat solutions as that, no matter what they call it.
"What does the SEC do?"
"Securities market stuff? I'm not sure, you should ask gippity"
Huh, I wonder how many adult content filters that domain is still on. That might be an impediment to them making it the primary domain in the short term.
> BREAKING NEWS: Secret acquirer of $15+ million domain chat .com revealed and it's exactly who you'd think.
> For those of you that have been following me for a while, you may recall that I announced earlier this year that I had acquired the domain chat .com for an "8 figure sum" (which was later reported as being $15.5M).
> I also shared that I had sold the domain to an undisclosed buyer.
> I was not at liberty to share who the acquirer was (I was going to leave that to them, when they were ready).
> Well, in a 8 character tweet (talk about brevity), Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI revealed that they were the buyer. If you visit the website now, it goes to ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is more than a foundation model. To use Claude as an example of where competitors are failing in comparison, you can't even do extremely basic stuff like upload PowerPoint decks or Excel spreadsheets, much less create custom GPTs.
Sure, but none of that is moat.
It’s just a feature on someone’s backlog.
The proof of that is chatgpt itself. OpenAI did not pioneer a lot of those kinds of features. They saw startups doing it and just did it themselves since it’s fairly straightforward to implement.
A scrappy startup can copy the vast majority of chatgpt features with another foundation model.
>A scrappy startup can copy the vast majority of chatgpt features with another foundation model.
Software is expensive to build, adoption is more expensive. If you ever try to convince someone to migrate in a B2B setting - you'll learn that its not enough to be cheaper, or better - you need to either be 10x cheaper or provide a next level experience that makes the existing product seem like a liability.
If you could copy ChatGPT's functionality (getting more expensive by the day), and offer it for $2/month - then folks might migrate. Otherwise the switching cost is too high for most.
> If you could copy ChatGPT's functionality (getting more expensive by the day)
You can. You can also make the core functionality of Twitter in a weekend.
Building software at this high a level isn’t too expensive or difficult, especially since the LLM provider you’d use handles the most difficult scaling issues for you.
> and offer it for $2/month
This you can’t really do. OpenAI can’t either tbf, they just have the runway to charge whatever they feel like… that cash is their moat.
Not for foundation models, and not when considered individually. But as long as OpenAI continues killing it with foundation models, continues moving up the stack with applications built on those models, and continues establishing market-leading parterships/integrations with companies like Microsoft and Apple, that's a moat.
That’s…not a moat. Here, I’ll let chatgpt tell you:
True moats often involve factors like network effects, brand strength, intellectual property, or significant operational efficiencies that are harder to replicate.
Superman doesn’t have a competitive moat, even if he manages to be the strongest and produce random powers out of nowhere - other superheroes pop up and monopolize various cities despite being nowhere near as powerful. Why? They are the recognizable local brand. That’s a moat. It’s not something Superman can easily do anything about. Heck, Superman’s strength even makes him unrelatable to most humans, actively harming him in the brand area.
The Superman analogy is fun, but moats are rarely that simple. About the real-world scenario I described, ChatGPT generated:
"The combination of OpenAI’s advancements in foundation models, application development, and strategic partnerships collectively creates a robust moat for several reasons: [list of reasons]
"Together, these elements form a substantial moat. OpenAI’s cutting-edge models create a technological barrier, its applications generate a sticky user base, and its partnerships expand its influence and operational support, making it difficult for competitors to replicate its entire ecosystem. This combination of technological, user-based, and strategic advantages creates a robust, multi-layered moat around OpenAI in the competitive AI landscape."
> you can't even do extremely basic stuff like upload PowerPoint decks or Excel spreadsheets
That's a UX implementation, not a moat. There's nothing ChatGPT-specific about vector stores/the Assistants API that Claude can't copy if there's enough demand.
not sure about reducing it to just chat but using the entire "chat gpt" as a verb is really common like "let me chatgpt this assignment" (love it or hate it is very common in schools)
It seems like they already own 80% of the market, and have hundreds of millions of users. They became a for-profit company, so hopefully their goal is going to be profit eventually.
I wonder whether running an ad on a ChatGPT conversation even pays for the cost of that conversation. I know the agent my company runs costs us 10x more to generate each response than an ad click would bring us in revenue. So, even if someone clicked on an ad every time they asked a question, we'd still lose money. Hmm.
I find it funny to think that SnapChat did the opposite and removed Chat to become Snap.
Either way it’s a bold move. It’s clearly easier to type and say. I wonder if they found GPT is just too unpleasant to say so trying to switch the brand is worth it to them.
What if it’s not about marketing & more about new functionality? In another comment this was compared to Twitter changing to X … what if this is ChatGPT becoming a chat app for peers & with gpt? Or a social network? People share their GPT chats so maybe they want to be the chat platform… sound too bold? They did search.
Has there been an official announcement regarding chat.com? The submitted title says ChatGPT is on chat.com but currently is just a redirect to good 'ol chatgpt.com.
good point. counterpoint: it'll catch on with more users in the general public with a shorter, easier name. gpt has to be repeated a few times or possible to make mistakes. gtp? gpd?
I mean I know what domain I'm telling my parents to visit and it isn't chat.openai.com or chatgpt.com. Don't think they need to rebrand but it's a good enough shortcut
You can take the boy out of silicon valley venture-backed web startups, but you can't take the silicon valley venture-backed web startups out of the boy
Is this some kind of marketing flex? "We are so recognizable, we can afford drop the only thing from our name that makes it make object level sense"?
Other examples: Transferwise -> Wise (despite them still doing transfers as their main business), WeWork -> We (ok, to be fair in my experience not so much work got done there at the best of times) etc.
These things also usually completely kill SEO. Like, how am I supposed to google for the nearest coworking space? "we near me" sounds ridiculous to type into a search engine.