Synchrony Financial partnered with OpenAI. The credit card company that finances your Amazon purchases and Target runs wants artificial intelligence to make checkout smoother. Smoother for whom remains unclear.
The collaboration sits in early stages. Translation: neither company knows what the f*ck they're doing yet but needed to send a press release before quarterly earnings. OpenAI builds chatbots that hallucinate legal briefs. Synchrony builds credit cards that charge interest rates last seen during the Carter administration. Match made in heaven.
Smoother online shopping experiences. Read that phrase again. Your current shopping experience involves clicking a button and entering sixteen numbers. Apparently this requires machine learning models trained on the entire internet. The cutting edge of consumer finance is making you type less while you rack up debt on a yoga mat you'll use twice.
Some product manager at Synchrony saw a ChatGPT demo and had a vision. What if customers could just chat their way into a store card? What if AI could pre-approve you for financing while you're still browsing? What if we removed every last friction point between impulse and bankruptcy?
Early stages means six months minimum before anything ships. By then OpenAI will have released four new models and Synchrony will have charged you compound interest on the consulting fees. The partnership announcement is the product. The vaporware is the point.
Retail traders saw the headline and bought both stocks. They read partnership with OpenAI and assumed Synchrony invented the future. They did not consider that the future might just be a chatbot asking if you want to finance your cart at checkout. They never do.
Congratulations to everyone who needed AI to make buying shit online even easier than it already was.
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