Sometimes you light so much cash on fire that you burn the whole house down.
OpenAI and Instacart are launching a grocery shopping experience inside of ChatGPT, allowing customers to brainstorm meal ideas, make a grocery list, and check out, all without leaving the chat interface.
This builds upon an existing partnership between OpenAI and Instacart; more than two years ago, Instacart launched an in-app AI search tool powered by ChatGPT, which helps shoppers ask questions about what to make for dinner or how to accommodate dietary restrictions.
The relationship between OpenAI and Instacart seems to have only deepened after former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo — who was already an OpenAI board member — joined the company as the CEO of Applications in May.
Agentic commerce — the use of AI tools to do shopping research and make purchases on a user’s behalf — is a current priority for OpenAI. Its most recent dev day focused on its plan to build apps into ChatGPT. In an early preview for developers, ChatGPT launched integrations with apps like Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, and Zillow; since then, OpenAI has announced further partnerships with Target, Intuit, and others.
Leading up to this year’s holiday shopping season, both OpenAI and Perplexity announced in-app features that help users make decisions about what products to buy — so, you could ask ChatGPT to help you find the best deal on a gaming laptop that matches your specific criteria. Adobe predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season.
Despite ChatGPT’s immense popularity, OpenAI is not making a profit, and it may not for another several years — if it ever does. Its products are so resource-intensive that even subscription costs don’t account for how much compute power the company uses to make its product work. These agentic commerce tools could give OpenAI another way of making money, since it’ll take an undisclosed “small fee” when it helps merchants make a sale. But it would take a whole lot of ChatGPT-based shopping for these fees to make a dent in OpenAI’s debt.
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Users think they see Target ads. Not “targeted ads.” Ads for Target.
Slop may be seeping into the nooks and crannies of our brains.
ChatGPT’s growth is starting to taper off, according to new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. Today, the OpenAI-owned AI chatbot remains the leader in the space, accounting for 50% of global downloads on mobile devices and 55% of the global monthly active users. However, Google’s Gemini has begun to outpace ChatGPT in terms of download growth, growth of monthly active users, and growth of time spent in app, the firm found.
Over time, that increased pace of adoption could help Gemini narrow the gap with ChatGPT. That’s something OpenAI is now worried about, as its recent “code red” memo indicated. The missive, penned by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, instructed staff to focus on improving the company’s AI products, particularly in areas like personalization, reliability, image generation, and more.
When looking at the recent data, it’s clear the race is not over yet: Both ChatGPT and Gemini continue to see sizable growth.
ChatGPT has seen its global monthly active users climb by 180% year-over-year as of November 2025, while Gemini’s monthly active users are up 170%.
But the new data indicates that ChatGPT’s global monthly active users only grew by around 6% from August to November, to reach roughly 810 million. (The monthly active user numbers in the above chart are rounded, the firm notes.) This figure could suggest the AI chatbot is nearing market saturation, Sensor Tower says.
Meanwhile, Google Gemini’s global monthly active users jumped by around 30% during the same time frame, as the release of its new image generation model, Nano Banana, drove increased adoption.
In addition, the report noted that around two times more U.S. Android users now engage with Gemini directly through the Android operating system compared with using the standalone Gemini mobile app. This could provide Google with a competitive advantage in the global market, where Android dominates, as it means Gemini isn’t constrained to only being used within a mobile app or web interface.
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Gemini is also increasing its share of the overall AI chatbot market when compared across all top apps like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity, and Grok. Over the past seven months (May-November 2025), Gemini increased its share of global monthly active users by three percentage points, the firm estimates.
But ChatGPT saw its share of global monthly active users drop three percentage points over the past four months (August-November 2025), by comparison.
Challenges from Perplexity and Claude may also be impacting ChatGPT, as both rivals saw triple-digit growth for their respective chatbots in 2025, with the former up 370% year-over-year, and the latter up 190%.
ChatGPT also saw its global downloads grow by 85% year-over-year as of November, but this lagged the overall cohort’s average growth of 110%.
Perplexity and Gemini saw the largest growth, up 215% and 190% year-over-year, respectively.
Finally, Gemini app users’ time spent in the app has more than doubled over the past few months, Sensor Tower said. As of November, Gemini users were spending 11 minutes per day in the app, up 120% from March. This is likely due to the popularity of its image generation model, Nano Banana, in September.
ChatGPT’s users’ daily time spent only increased by 6% during the same time frame. Plus, ChatGPT users’ time spent was down 10% in November, compared with July.
While the current data indicates Google could be catching up with the market leader, much of its recent gains have to do with the success of Nano Banana. OpenAI could speed up growth again with the release of its own new products, if they make a similar impact.
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