ChatGPT now offers a dedicated shopping assistant (www.engadget.com)

OpenAI has begun rolling out "shopping research," a dedicated shopping assistant inside ChatGPT available to all users (including free accounts) and optimized for the holiday shopping season. Accessible from the + menu or auto-triggered for commerce-related prompts, the tool helps compare products, hunt deals, shop for gifts, and find lookalikes from photos (for example, find a similar dress under a specified price). It asks clarifying questions to refine recommendations and — for ChatGPT Pulse subscribers — can proactively surface personalized buying guides based on past conversations. OpenAI is offering nearly unlimited usage through the holidays to encourage adoption. The assistant is powered by a GPT-5 mini variant trained specifically on commerce tasks: reading trusted sites, citing reliable sources, and synthesizing specs across listings to produce higher-quality product research and more accurate citations than general-purpose models. OpenAI cautions it can still err on price and availability and performs best in detail-rich categories like electronics, beauty and home appliances, so users should verify merchant sites. The move expands ChatGPT’s role in e-commerce, heightening competition with Google and accelerating AI-driven shopping experiences — while raising familiar trust and verification considerations.