OpenAI revamps ChatGPT's shopping experience by letting users upload images or describe items and include criteria like their budget
OpenAI is rolling out a new shopping experience within ChatGPT to make it easier for users to find and compare products, after its Instant Checkout feature failed to take off.
CNBCAshley Capoot
Context & Ripple Effects
ChatGPT’s commerce push began with product recommendations that sent shoppers to merchant sites, then expanded into guided shopping research and an Instacart grocery flow. The current redesign shifts emphasis toward product discovery and comparison rather than treating checkout as the central feature.
That adjustment follows OpenAI’s move to scale back direct Instant Checkout, after reports that merchant-data standardization slowed its expansion. Image uploads also build on ChatGPT’s recent improvements to editing user-uploaded images.
First-order effects
ChatGPT users can now start product searches from an image or natural-language description and constrain results with requirements such as budget, making comparison a more multimodal task inside the assistant.
OpenAI redirects its shopping proposition from completing transactions in ChatGPT toward helping users identify and evaluate products after Instant Checkout failed to gain traction.
Second-order effects
Merchants and commerce partners have greater incentive to make product information legible for conversational comparison, while retaining checkout in their own apps or sites.
Shopping assistants that rely chiefly on text queries face pressure to match image-led discovery and criteria-based comparison, not merely provide recommendation links.
Third-order effects
The episode supports a more incremental form of agentic commerce: assistants may first win the research layer, while transaction execution remains with merchants until data and integration constraints ease.
If this pattern persists, product discovery could become a key interface controlled by general-purpose assistants, increasing the importance of how merchants’ catalogs are represented in those systems.
The trend: AI commerce is moving from embedded checkout experiments toward multimodal, intent-led product discovery that can hand transactions back to existing merchant channels.
Starting this week, millions of @Shopify merchants can sell in ChatGPT, into the US. Their PDP, their checkout, their customizations, no extra setup. AI is a new front door to commerce. Shopify is what's behind it everywhere. [video]
wouldn't be surprised if we're headed toward a world in which glorified affiliate links are playing a load-bearing role for the sustainability of the LLM companies. who doesn't love a good middleman? [embedded post]
The OpenAI recapitalization is maybe the largest theft in all of history. It seems clearly illegal and should be reversed. That said, hiring Jacob Trefethen is a great move.
AI will help discover new science, such as cures for diseases, which is perhaps the most important way to increase quality of life long-term. AI will also present new threats to society that we have to address. No company can sufficiently mitigate these on their own; we will
Last fall, OpenAI announced its recapitalization, paving the way for the OpenAI Foundation to access significant resources. On behalf of the Board, I'm excited to share an update today on how the Foundation is starting to put that support to work - including our plans to spend at
The new OpenAI nonprofit just announced that it aims to spend $1B in its *first year" and will be led by two superb humans — @JacobTref and @woj_zaremba. Simply put, this initiative has huge potential to do a whole lot of good. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Very sad to lose Jacob at CG - he's been with us since 2018 and instrumental in so much of our global health R&D work. But I can't think of anyone better for the huge role he's stepping into. Very excited to see what he'll do!
I'm joining the OpenAI Foundation to lead the Life Sciences & Curing Diseases program. We're starting with three areas of grantmaking: * AI for Alzheimer's * Public Data for Health * Accelerating Progress on High-Mortality and High-Burden Diseases Time to get to work! [image]