[uses]

Someone educated me on this type of thing a while back. Chat.com - and other highly reusable URLs - is a non-deteriorating asset that has a value on OpenAI's ledger somewhere. It's not like they bought $10,000,000 worth of catering or fuel or labor even buildings. Because someday, the owning entity can sell it for about what they spent on it. And I imagine there is some kind of financial instrument to take out a loan with the domain as collateral. My point is, it's not really like they "spent" the money as much as they just parked it in a domain name.

[solarkraft]

That it keeps its value is a huge assumption.

[xp84]

GP said highly reusable URLs. Roughly by definition, it's enduringly desirable. It is valuable in a way that say, Kmart dot com is not, since it has an open-ended set of uses. I chose the Kmart example because that domain is associated with a specific brand that's universally known to be irrelevant, which caps its value to whatever cash one could make "redirect to affiliate links" generate with random legacy traffic it gets. You wouldn't use it for a dating site, or even for a grocery delivery startup.

A 'temporarily reusable' tier might be something like "DVD dot com" or "rtx dot com" or something -- presumably there's a lot less money in DVD than there was 20 years ago, and presumably raytracing won't be an exciting high-end thing people are excited about 20 years from now. They're valuable and quite reusable at one point, but could become low-value by the time the company decides to unload them.

[sigmoid10]

I'd say any single syllable common english word .com url has a high intrinsic value that will not go down unless english stops being the de facto lingua franca of the internet.

[whalesalad]

Four letter English word, .com tld, it will certainly hold its value.

[tylergetsay]

Is it really "owned"? Couldn't ICANN change the rules around ownership which would decrease its value?

[csomar]

That will throw a nuclear bomb on the whole .com. Things are already not that good with the US being able to seize .com. I don't think ICANN pulling something off will make it better.

[sirspacey]

A four letter doc com that has become the verb for AI.

Not that huge.

[amadeuspagel]

I think they can't just sell that domain anymore, without allowing some scam to take it over. It's associated with their brand now.

[paulddraper]

They definitely bought it.

Though you are correct it is a durable asset. (As are buildings.)