Walmart is officially teaming up with OpenAI so you can shop the world’s largest retailer without ever visiting their site . Soon, ChatGPT users (all 800 million of them per week) will be able to buy Walmart products just by prompting: “Find me a TV under $400,” “I need a last-minute birthday gift,” etc. Fresh food is off the menu for now, but almost everything else is fair game. Walmart+ perks still count, which feels like a quiet flex.

Why Walmart’s making this move: It’s a chance to get ahead of Amazon in the AI shopping race and plant its flag inside the fastest-growing digital habit: talking to a bot instead of typing a search. If AI is where product discovery happens, Walmart wants to be in the conversation, literally.

And Walmart investors clearly like the direction; shares jumped nearly five percent on the announcement.

For OpenAI, this partnership is big because it:

For consumers? Expect scenario-based carts (“plan my Thanksgiving dinner under $100”) to become a thing. This is the beginning of agent-style shopping, where you stop browsing and simply prompt your way to an AI-assembled cart. Can’t be any easier than that!

Startups who read beehiiv can receive a 90% discount on Intercom's AI-first customer service platform, plus Fin—the #1 AI agent for customer service—free for a full year.

That's like having a full-time human support agent at no cost.

What’s included?

Who’s eligible?

Intercom’s program is for high-growth, high-potential companies that are:

Apply now

Spotify just locked in deals with all the major record labels to build AI music tools — not in secret like the scrappy startups, but with contracts and signatures like responsible adults. Instead of another AI Wild West, this sets up a regulated AI music ecosystem where new AI products and tools come with a revenue split with the artists and labels used to create them. Spotify’s pitch is simple: AI should serve artists, not the other way around. Never mind that Spotify stands to make a fortune.

Think the AI stock bubble looks frothy in the U.S.? In China, AI and chip stocks have surged up to 400%, with valuations hitting 60–80× earnings — far higher than anything on Wall Street. For reference, Nvidia sits around 40×. Fueled by government cash and a push to ditch foreign chip suppliers, investors are pouring into anything labeled “AI.” The result is a market that looks more government-orchestrated hype than organic innovation, raising the question: is China building the future of AI, or are they setting themselves up for a Soviet-style collapse?

Welcome to the AI housing market: San Francisco’s AI boom isn’t just inflating valuations, it’s inflating rent. Startups flush with VC cash are bulk-leasing luxury apartment units and even offering rent stipends to keep employees within walking distance of AI headquarters. Meanwhile, regular renters are treating apartment hunting like a second job, lining up with envelopes of cash and job offer letters just to get a landlord’s attention. The result? A housing market where AI engineers live in company-subsidized penthouses while everyone else fights over the scraps.

The problem with most business news? It’s too long, too boring, and way too complicated.

Morning Brew fixes all three. In five minutes or less, you’ll catch up on the business, finance, and tech stories that actually matter—written with clarity and just enough humor to keep things interesting.

It’s quick. It’s free. And it’s how over 4 million professionals start their day. Signing up takes less than 15 seconds—and if you’d rather stick with dense, jargon-packed business news, you can always unsubscribe.

Check it out

Most AI vision systems can tell you what something is: “that’s a kettle.” It knows this based off training on countless images of kettles. But Stanford researchers just took a leap forward: they taught AI to understand the object’s use. Instead of just labeling an image “kettle,” the model understands the kettle’s purpose: pouring.

The unlock for AI models:

👉 Why it matters for business: Instead of training AI one tool at a time like a toddler, this teaches it transferable logic — aka, the dream of an AI coworker that isn’t narrow, brittle, or painfully literal.