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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 chronicledin detail. But shouldn’t the OpenAI people have figured that out within an hour or two of first discussing this idea internally?
This isn’t the first time OpenAI has quietly abandoned something it had recently announced. A week before OpenAI announced Instant Checkout, the company and Nvidia proclaimed a “strategic partnership” in which Nvidia would invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI while the AI firm would buy lots of AI chips from Nvidia. That deal also died a quiet death. Last week, OpenAI announced that Nvidia would instead invest $30 billion.
It seems obvious that OpenAI tends to announce stuff that isn’t fully baked. Perhaps CEO Sam Altman likes to demonstrate that the company is moving quickly. We saw that with its rushed announcement of a deal with the Pentagon on Friday night, shortly after the Pentagon had declared war on Anthropic. A few days later, OpenAI had to announce amendments to its deal after widespread criticism of the agreement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly acknowledged earlier this week that “we shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday. The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication.” He said it was a “good learning experience for me.” Hopefully, the Instant Checkout retreat also tells Altman he should sort out the details before unveiling new products.
2025’s IPO Class Flunks Out
There’s a lot of chatter nowadays about big upcoming IPOs. But given the disasters that made up most of last year’s IPO class, investors should feel a little wary. One of the biggest disappointments is StubHub, the ticketing firm whose weak fourth-quarter earnings report on Wednesday sent the stock down 12% to just below $9. That’s 62% of where it went public last September.
The company now has a market capitalization of about $3.7 billion. As we’ve written, StubHub originally wanted to go public at a valuation of $16.5 billion, which is where it raised money in 2021. Oops!
The stunning thing is that StubHub is just one of several of last year’s IPOs to be trading 60% or so below its IPO price. Shares of Klarna, a U.K.-based instalment lender, are down 66%, while stock of crypto exchange Gemini is down 67%. Travel software firm Navan is off 56%. It’s safe to say that 2025 would have been a good year for investors to avoid tech-related IPOs.
In Other News
• Some U.S. officials are drafting rules requiring companies and other governments to seek Commerce Department approval to buy AI chips that end up outside the country, according to a U.S. official briefed about it (more here).
• Chip designer Broadcom reported 29% revenue growth for the January quarter, driven by a 106% expansion in revenue from its fast-growing AI chip business.
• Oracle is planning to cut thousands of employees as soon as this month, according to a Bloomberg report, which said the cuts will be “wider-reaching” than the firm’s typical rolling reductions.
• OKX, a crypto exchange giant that’s been considering a U.S. IPO, said it had received a strategic investment from the Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, that values the crypto firm at $25 billion.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check today’s episode of TITV in which we unpack our exclusive reporting about OpenAI's revised shopping and ad tech strategies.
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