On Tuesday, OpenAI launched a new product called Dots, an always-on AI agent with a bubbly, blobby avatar. While the colorful avatar may evoke a smile, the biggest laugh of the launch is (we imagine) that of Elon Musk, the former founder of OpenAI who left, launched its competitor Grok and continued unsuccessfully.
Indeed, the domain “dot.com” belongs to Musk’s xAI and currently redirects to the download page of xAI’s Grok chatbot application. According to the Whois domain owner registry, this domain name was just transferred in July.
It is entirely possible that xAI purchased the domain for normal domain purchasing reasons. “Dot” could be a typo of “bot”, so he typed it to catch mistyped searches. We contacted xAI and asked them. But xAI doesn’t own the name “bot.com,” or other obvious typo domains like “vot.com,” which is up for sale.
The Internet theory is much funnier: Musk (or his team) pulled a prank by getting wind of OpenAI’s new product and its name and buying the domain name.
In fact, anonymous Whatever the motivation, the circumstances are funny.
And as for the domain “dots.com,” which corresponds more directly to the product name, it is currently owned by a long-defunct company. So if a little revenge prank was really the motivation, grabbing that name too would be the next level.
Gn headline
