Tech
Walmart Partners With OpenAI, Targeting Amazon
Walmart and OpenAI just announced an new partnership to make Walmart’s products shoppable … and buyable right in ChatGPT
Getty Images
The “Buy Now” button is coming to ChatGPT, and Walmart is a big part of that. Walmart says it is enabling AI-first shopping experiences via a new partnership with OpenAI, the massive AI company behind ChatGPT. The alliance is a shot across the bow of e-commerce giant Amazon, which owns about 40% of the entire U.S. retail e-commerce market, compared to only 6.4% for Walmart.
The move is strategic on multiple levels.
AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT are rapidly becoming the go-to entry point to the internet for younger people when they have questions that need answers. This displaces Google, to an extent, and disrupts search engine optimization tactics that have long driven e-commerce traffic and revenue. While Amazon is a massive product search engine in its own right, the user experience is getting worse and worse as ads occupy most of the top Amazon product search results and prices rise thanks to the platform’s fees on sellers.
So Walmart is attempting to capitalize on emerging consumer behavior changes to capture more market share.
“For many years now, eCommerce shopping experiences have consisted of a search bar and a long list of item responses,” Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon said in a statement. “That is about to change.”
Walmart is betting that people want to ask ChatGPT what is the best dishwasher or hair dryer, or even ask ChatGPT to order them some toilet paper or oranges. While the last two might require additional cultural shifts, the first two are getting more and more commonplace.
“ChatGPT drives ~52 million daily purchase-related conversations,” Shelfsight founder Joe Murphy said recently, citing a study released last month titled How People Use ChatGPT.
People already use ChatGPT for product search and comparison.
John Koetsier
They’re asking questions like “what’s the best laptop under $1,000,” or “which protein bar has the highest rating,” or “what’s a good streaming service.”
“ChatGPT is quickly becoming a new front door for product discovery,” Murphy says. “For brands selling at retail, this trend is impossible to ignore.”
Walmart says this will be a native AI experience: multimedia, personalized and contextual. That means you’ll be able to get video, audio, and images along with your searches, and then links to purchase right inside ChatGPT once you’ve linked your Walmart’s account.
The Walmart-OpenAI tie-up does open up a Pandora’s box, of course.
Will the product results you see in ChatGPT still be the best ones available, or will that be influenced by how much money ChatGPT can make if you buy one? Will they show up as promoted or sponsored results, or will they look exactly like all the other answers?
And, of course, Amazon will not be defeated so easily.
Besides its status as the e-commerce king, Amazon ties its customer tightly to its services via available free delivery with Amazon Prime. And, given that Amazon has heavily invested in its delivery services–including with experimental drone delivery–it’s not just about free delivery but fast, reliable delivery.
What this foreshadows, however, is the future of commerce: my AI agents talking to e-commerce agents about products I want, and negotiating a price, delivery, and all the other details.
Walmart has made a smart strategic move. Amazon has plenty of available responses.
Tech
Samsung TVs Bring Centre Pompidou Museum Masterpieces To Your Living Room
Samsung has announced that it’s secured a partnership with Paris’s famed Centre Pompidou museum that will bring no less than 25 of the gallery’s most famous and revered masterpieces to Samsung’s online digital Art Store, enabling Samsung TV owners to download digital versions of the artworks to use as stunning low-power screen savers on their TVs. This being, of course, a far superior solution to your TV just leaving a big black rectangle in your room when you put it into standby.
La Fée électricité by Raoul Dufy is one of 25 masterpieces held at the Centre Pompidou Museum in Paris that’s about to be added to Samsung TV’s Art Store.
Photo: Centre Pompidou
The 25 Centre Pompidou paintings set to join Samsung’s Art Store from November 25 include Frida Kahlo’s The Frame, Piet Mondrian’s New York City, Wassily Kandinsky’s Get-Rot-Blau, Henri Matisse’s La Tristesse du Roi, Raul Dufy’s La Fée électricité and other works from the likes of Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Yves Klein and Peter Doig. The collection spans more than 100 years of art history, reflecting what Samsung describes as “Pompidou’s role as a living archive of the modern art world.”
The Art Store is available on multiple models in Samsung’s 2025 TV line up, but the “turning a TV into a painting” concept is at its most impressive in the brand’s The Frame and The Frame Pro models. Thanks to such features as remarkably effective anti-reflection matte-finish screens, customisable bezels, flush wall mounts and, in the Frame Pro’s case, external wireless connections boxes so that you don’t have to connect any messy source cables to the TV, the customary differences between TVs and paintings really do get scrubbed away.
The Frame Pros also feature an upgraded “Neo” Quantum Dot LED screen compared with the regular Frame TVs, but experience suggests that the new Pompidou masterpieces will look remarkably life-like no matter which Frame TV you play them on.
Samsung’s The Frame and The Frame Pro TVs are specially designed to look like paintings when playing works of art from Samsung’s Art Store.
Photo: Samsung Electronics
Other Samsung TVs that now carry the Art Store and so will be able to access the Centre Pompidou collection include its premium Neo QLED 8K, Neo QLED 4K and even relatively basic core QLED models.
Adding the Centre Pompidou masterpiece collection to Samsung’s Art Store obviously vastly increases the number of people who can enjoy these works of art on a daily basis, without having to physically travel to the museum. There’s an added bonus to the Centre Pompidou collection joining the Samsung Art Store right now, though, since the museum is about to shut its doors for what’s described as a “once-in-a-generation renovation”. So the Art Store will enable art lovers to keep enjoying the museum’s masterpieces in glorious ultra high resolution while we wait for the refreshed Pompidou to open its doors at some point in 2030.
“Centre Pompidou has always stood at the intersection of art and innovation,” says Gaële de Medeiros, Head of International and Economic Development at the Centre Pompidou. “Through this [Samsung] partnership, our collection continues to be seen, shared and lived with, even as our physical space transforms.”
“Art doesn’t lose its power when walls close, it finds new ones,” adds Daria Greene, Head of Content & Curation at Samsung. “Through The Frame [TVs], these works can exist beyond geography, inviting people to experience modern art as part of their everyday lives.”
The new Centre Pompidou’s artworks will join collections already available on the Samsung Art Store from such galleries as The Met, The Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Musée d’Orsay.
—
Related Reading
Samsung 115-Inch Micro RGB TV First Look: Boldly Goes Where No TV Has Gone Before
Samsung Launches Trio Of New Gaming Monitors—Including World’s First 500Hz OLED
Samsung Signs Up Multiple New Global TV Partners For Its Tizen OS Smart System
Tech
Google Has A Special Offer For Pixel Customers
Google’s Pixel 8 Pro
Ewan Spence
Earlier this month, Google refreshed the Pixel Refurbished store by removing the whole Pixel 6 family, leaving only the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel 7a. Many were asking when the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro would be available in the store.
This weekend, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro models are now available in the store.
Pixel 8 And Pixel 8 Pro Arrive In Google’s Refurbished Store
With the main line of Pixel phones moving up a step to the Pixel 10 family, bumping up the models available in the refurbished store would keep the same gap between the various online options available directly from Google. Now that the initial launch window for the Pixels is over — and presumably Google casting half an eye at the holiday seasons — it’s time for the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro to show up.
The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones are refurbished units. As with the Pixel 7 family already on sale and previous Pixels sold through this part of the store, they will have undergone several tests, and some parts will have been replaced as required. Special attention is paid to the battery, housing and screens during the process, as well as an update to the latest version of Android.
Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and AI
Crucially, the launch of the Pixel 8 family was the point where Google leaned into artificial intelligence, labelling them “AI-first” smartphones, with the Tensor G3 chipsets introducing extensive silicon to support local AI processing; if mobile AI is a key consideration in a purchase, the edge that the G3 offers over the Pixel 7 family’s G2 is the most significant difference between the sevens and the eights.
Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro Price
Pixel 8 Pro pricing starts at $699 for the 128 GB model (which represents a $300 saving on the retail price for a new model). The Pixel 8 starts at $489 for the 128 GB model (down from $699) and $539 for the 256 GB model. Check the latest Pixel prices here.
Not all colors and storage options are immediately available. This is likely down to the fluctuations that any refurbished product will face, rather than a specific choice. If there is a particular color and storage option that you want in a Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro, you’ll need to keep a close eye on the storefront.
Now read the latest Pixel, Galaxy, and smartphone headlines in Forbes’ weekly Android news digest…
Tech
Apple iPhone 16 Pro Prices Slashed Further In New Sale
In September, Apple launched the iPhone 17 series, and iPhone Air. This meant two things: the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus dropped in price, and the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max were immediately removed from sale at Apple.
Apple iPhone 16 Pro
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
But if you were after a Pro, the good news is you can still pick one up, for a lower price than before.
The deals highlighted in this post were independently selected by the Contributor and do not contain affiliate links.
You can’t buy these phones from Apple, you understand — that’s unlikely to be available direct from Apple until next spring or summer, in the refurbished section.
But other retailers, like Amazon, have been selling the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max for some months, and the prices are now especially low.
Amazon has different levels of refurbished offers, with the top tier called Renewed Premium. These offers can be locked to a service provider or be unlocked for use with any network — that’s what I’m concentrating on here.
The lowest-storage option, with 128GB storage, isn’t available, but since the iPhone 17 Pro base storage has now jumped to 256GB for $799, maybe that’s where we should focus anyway.
When it went on sale in September 2024, the iPhone 16 Pro with 256GB storage sold for $1,099 when new. Right now at Amazon, you can snap this phone up in renewed premium condition for $834.99 in black titanium, $838.97 in desert titanium and white titanium. Not only does this work out at $260 or more off the original purchase price, but it’s also a lot less than Amazon’s Renewed Premium pricing in August, before the new phones came out. At that point, white titanium, for instance, was around $70 more. These prices even beat the recent Prime Day bargains.
Move up to 512GB storage, originally $1,299 from Apple in new condition, is available in white titanium and black titanium for $889.95 in renewed premium condition, around $70 less than the renewed premium price in late August, and about $40 less than offers around Prime Day.
Finally, the biggest storage capacity, 1TB, which used to sell new for $1,499, is available in natural titanium in renewed premium for $949.95, which is $549 off its new sticker price. You could also choose it in black titanium, but it’s over $100 more at $1,159.97. For reference, the black titanium cost $999 in the deals around Prime Day.
-
Tech1 week ago
Decart Brings Real-Time AI To Real-Time Creators At TwitchCon
-
Entertainment1 week ago
Mohra Episode 43 – Alizeh & Sikandar’s Track Engages Fans
-
Entertainment6 days ago
Main Manto Nahi Hoon Episode 27 – Fans Feel For Shamraiz
-
Entertainment1 week ago
PISA 2025 Nominations Out | Reviewit.pk
-
Tech2 weeks ago
Realme 15 Series Debuts in Pakistan with AI Edit Genie, Slim 7000mAh Battery, and Triple 50MP Cameras
-
Entertainment1 week ago
Angeline Malik Shares Her Cancer Symptoms
-
Tech1 week ago
Pakistani Social Impact Initiative, ‘Dil Se’ Wins Gold at ‘Dragons of Asia’
-
Business2 weeks ago
Shares at PSX rebound, gain 4,600 points in intraday trade