Comment by tyre

7 hours ago

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.

17 comments

tyre

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rpozarickij  6 hours ago

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".

  • parl_match  6 hours ago

    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

    • zxexz  5 hours ago

      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

chirau  2 hours ago

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.

  • testdelacc1  1 hour ago

    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.

smelendez  6 hours ago

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.

  • idiotsecant  1 minute ago

    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.

fny  6 hours ago

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

Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.