OpenAI retires products
OpenAI said it’s retiring GPT‑4o and several other efforts — including the Walmart 'Sparky' chatbot and an initial payment product — citing lack of flexibility and a need to refocus on core search and seller‑controlled features. The move highlights rapid reprioritization in AI product roadmaps. (forbes.com.mx)
OpenAI set an explicit retirement date for legacy ChatGPT models — GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini and OpenAI o4‑mini — effective February 13, 2026, and said the change does not affect API access. (openai.com) OpenAI reported that only 0.1% of users still chose GPT‑4o daily as of the retirement announcement. (openai.com) Sam Altman disclosed that ChatGPT reached roughly 800 million weekly active users in October 2025, which makes 0.1% usage translate to about 800,000 users in absolute terms. (techcrunch.com) OpenAI said improvements from GPT‑4o informed GPT‑5.1 and GPT‑5.2 — including personality, creative ideation, and user controls such as base styles and tone settings — as part of its consolidation strategy. (openai.com) OpenAI acknowledged that its initial Instant Checkout implementation lacked merchant-level flexibility and announced a shift to prioritize product discovery while allowing merchants to run their own checkout flows under an expanded Agentic Commerce Protocol. (retaildive.com) Walmart supplied roughly 200,000 products to OpenAI’s Instant Checkout beginning in November 2025 and reported that in‑chat purchases converted about three times worse than click‑out transactions to its website. (thepaypers.com) Walmart will instead embed its own Sparky shopping assistant inside platforms including ChatGPT and Google Gemini, support account linking and cart sync so transactions complete in Walmart’s systems, and rolled the ChatGPT integration out to paid subscribers in March 2026 with wider availability planned. (thepaypers.com)
