OpenAI Goes Shopping

You might think the $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts would be today’s biggest business event. But that’s yesterday’s news—word of the deal broke on Friday. (For more on that, see below). Today’s biggest news, in reality, is OpenAI’s launch of its shopping feature, which puts the ChatGPT creator in competition with everyone from Amazon to Instagram. 

OpenAI unveiled what it calls an Instant Checkout feature, which it said was its first step “toward agentic commerce in ChatGPT.” For the moment, there doesn’t seem to be much that is “agentic” about this: People can search ChatGPT for information about a product and then buy it. Despite the announcement’s hyperbole, the quick checkout feature is an important step for OpenAI. Given that the company seems to be trying to spend all the money in the global banking system on data centers, this promises to bring in some revenue, as merchants will pay a small fee on purchases. In particular, this service will help OpenAI find a way to get money out of the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT without paying.