OpenAI’s Shopping Glitch

This wasn’t a fun day on Wall Street—the S&P 500 fell 0.5%—but one group of stocks bucked the downward trend. That would be those of several travel-booking and food-delivery firms, such as DoorDash, Booking Holdings and Expedia, which climbed between 3% and 13%. One likely reason is OpenAI’s astounding retreat from offering shopping directly in ChatGPT. While it wasn’t a travel-booking or food-delivery service, investors had clearly been worried it could expand. The threat of AI disruption had depressed travel stocks lately. And concerns that ChatGPT might undercut consumer apps had been out there for a while.

Still, the bigger significance of OpenAI’s change of heart isn’t how it lifted some stocks today. It’s what this retreat says about OpenAI’s rather chaotic approach to product development. The company unveiled the Instant Checkout service, which promised to allow people to buy things “without ever leaving the chat,” just five months ago. Now ChatGPT will send shoppers to merchant apps when they want to buy stuff. ChatGPT still makes shopping easy—it only takes a couple of clicks to get to the merchant storefront, whereas giving Google’s Gemini the same prompt can take many more steps. But OpenAI’s management looks amateurish for having reversed itself so quickly. Sure, the company was attempting something very difficult, as we chronicled in detail. But shouldn’t the OpenAI people have figured that out within an hour or two of first discussing this idea internally?