Walmart fires OpenAI in playbook-changing move(thestreet.com)
41 points by petethomas 2 days ago | 8 comments
- djmips 2 days agoIs Sparky better because it has privileged access to Walmart Data and and business knowledge?
- cf100clunk 2 days agoIts not that Walmart abandoned AI, it just swapped out OpenAI's chatbot for its own.[-]
- brianwawok 2 days agoWhich is potentially powered by ChatGPT according to the article?[-]
- JumpCrisscross 2 days ago> Which is potentially powered by ChatGPT
It’s not. It’s distributed through ChatGPT and Claude. But Sparky is Walmart’s kit.
[-]- kotaKat 2 days agoIt sounds more like they probably have some kind of generic prompt that runs on top of either platform to "be" "Sparky" to provide Walmart sales and advertising on top.
I wonder if this is so Walmart can sell the advertising for products inside Sparky from their own platform (Walmart Connect) and then run the Connect ads onwards 'inside' Sparky.
See also: https://www.walmartconnect.com/resources/articles/2025/the-n...
- hooloovoo_zoo 2 days agoWell, they seem to be using 3rd party LLMs for websearch.[-]
- JumpCrisscross 2 days ago> they seem to be using 3rd party LLMs for websearch
Source?
[-]- hooloovoo_zoo 2 days agoIf you ask the agent a product question you can trigger it into web search mode where it provides web links and autocomplete suggestions. You can follow the a/c suggestions down some pretty elaborate chains of questions but eventually it hits a rate limit and reverts to the default dumb bot.