OpenAI's plans to make ChatGPT more like Amazon aren't going so well | TechCrunch

OpenAI’s plans to make ChatGPT into an e-commerce hub aren’t exactly panning out—at least, not yet. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company revealed that it’s pivoting away from a recently launched feature that let users buy items directly from the chatbot’s interface. OpenAI originally launched buying capabilities in ChatGPT last year—positioning itself as a “shopping assistant” that could connect consumers to relevant vendors. A feature called “Instant Checkout” launched in September and encouraged users to talk with the chatbot about what they were looking to buy and, much like a traditional e-commerce site, add products to a checkout cart within ChatGPT itself. The items were purchased from the vendors themselves, but ChatGPT acted as a portal for those purchases. Instant Checkout has not been a huge success, however, because, on Tuesday—amidst other update announcements relevant to ChatGPT’s shopping experience—OpenAI said that it would be scaling back the feature. “We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide, so we’re allowing merchants to use their own checkout experiences while we focus our efforts on product discovery,” the company explained in a blog post. OpenAI clarified to TechCrunch that merchants would still have the option of incorporating the feature for the time being through apps within ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson said that the company would be deprioritizing the develop...