Here come the shopping assistants
gm legends. It’s Sunday funday.
This week: why OpenAI and Perplexity are putting items in your shopping cart, what to watch for ahead of the Orbit Awards, lessons from a Product Hunt black belt, and where were you when LLMs went big? Plus: some of the top launches from the past week
Raid the fridge, grab some leftover turkey and pie, and stuff your face while you fill your mind.
P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶
Just in time for Cyber Monday
Is it still a personal shopper if it’s not a person?
Last Monday, OpenAI unveiled its “shopping research” feature. You say what you’re looking for — e.g., “decorations for a sheep-themed birthday” or “a Christmas gift for my father who hates gifts” — and ChatGPT delivers a buyer’s guide.
Not to be outdone before Black Friday, Perplexity put out its own AI shopping assistant. Want to buy the suggestions? Just click and complete the purchase with PayPal. Oh, and let’s not forget about Google’s AI shopping features, which came out in mid-November. Google even lets you see how prices have changed over time, kind of like you do when buying airplane tickets.
AI + shopping isn’t new, but the scope and scale might be. Here are some AI-powered tools from shopping sites;
- Shop, Shopify’s AI shopping assistant that shows you results from any stores that use Shopify
- Agora, a “decentralized Amazon” that uses AI to scour ecommerce sites
- Amazon Rufus, which lets you have a conversation with an AI shopping assistant and get recommendations; it also launched Amazon Buy for Me, an agent that purchases items Amazon doesn’t have in stock.
Orbit Awards coming Dec. 1
Not sure whether you heard, but after 10 golden years we’re sunsetting the Golden Kitty Awards. “What will I do for end-of-year awards entertainment?!” you scream. No worries: You’re getting even more awards coverage.
Introducing the Orbit Awards, a quarterly series that is less about what happens on launch day and more about what happens after it. Think: products with great reviews, actual community engagement, and real traction.
Edition #1 is out tomorrow (December 1), and it’s all about AI dictation tools. Future editions will cover vibecoding tools, AI automation builders, AI meeting note-takers, and coding agents.
Got a tool you love and want to see it rewarded? Hop on and leave a review ASAP.
Your agents stopped answering and started doing
Your agents call tools, write to databases and move money, so a wrong answer is now a wrong action, which is a considerably worse meeting. Arcjet runs policy before every LLM call, tool call, query and API request: prompt injection, sensitive data, bots, rate limits, spend quotas, and your own rules in Rego on top. It reads the OpenTelemetry you already emit, so switching it on is one environment variable, no code changes and nothing to deploy. Each check also reads the earlier steps in the same workflow, so an agent's tenth action gets judged against the first nine and not on its own. JavaScript, Python and Go SDKs all at 1.0, agent framework guards included, free tier to start on.
How to be a Product Hunt power user
Nika, a marketer, is one of Product Hunt’s most active users. The owner of an 1100-day streak, she’s never missed a day since joining three years ago. She’s launched two products here, posts several tantalizing forum questions per week, and regularly gives feedback on others’ launches.
On her third anniversary with Product Hunt, she’s giving three pieces of advice on how to use Product Hunt to market, network, and launch.
Name the Product Hunt launch
Here’s an easy one. On this day (November 30) in 2022, a (very) large language model was released to the public. It quickly went parabolic. Two days later, Chris Messina hunted it, and it finished #1 for the day and week. It went on to win the Golden Kitty Award for Product of the Year. Surprisingly, although it’s still widely used today, it only ranked #3 for December 2022.
Leaderboard highlights
