Is ChatGPT’s New Shopping Research Solving a Problem, or Creating One?

OpenAI’s latest update attempts to bridge the gap between conversation and commerce. But in doing so, it risks losing the very "reasoning" capability that made it revolutionary.

When OpenAI announced its new shopping search capabilities, I took the news with a grain of salt (perhaps the whole shaker).
For the past decade, we have watched the slow evolution of traditional search engines. What began as tools for pure information discovery gradually morphed into ecosystems dominated by SEO-optimized content and sponsored results. My initial fear with ChatGPT’s update was simple: Are we seeing the beginning of a similar shift? Is the purity of the “reasoning engine” being diluted by the necessity of commerce?
After testing the new shopping integration, the results suggest that we are at a pivotal moment in the user experience of Generative AI, one that requires an open discussion about ...