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Comment by jaimebuelta | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars"

But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff.

How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase? Sure an agent may help in shaping the list, but I don't see how allowing the agent to do purchases directly on your end is way more convenient, so I'm fine with taking the risk of doing something really silly.

"Hey agent, find me and compare insurance for my car for my use case. Oh, good. I'll pick insurance A and finish the purchase"

And many of the purchases that we do are probably enjoyable and we don't want really to remove ourselves from the process.

View on HN

When Amazon came out with the "dash" button and then the "Alexa" speakers, I figured they must have expected they'd get some unintended purchases, and that they'd make more profit from those than they'd lose in the people going through the refund process. (That, or they'd learn whether it was profitable, and eat it as an R&D cost if it turned out to be unprofitable.)

I think this might be similar. In short, it's not consumers who want robots to buy for them, it's producers who want robots to buy from them using consumers dollars.

I think more money comes from offering this value to every online storefront, so long as they pay a fee. "People will accidentally buy your coffee with our cool new robot. Research says only 1% of people will file a return, while 6% of new customers will turn into recurring customers. And we only ask for a 3% cut."

> In short, it's not consumers who want robots to buy for them, it's producers who want robots to buy from them using consumers dollars.

This. Humans are lazy and often don’t provide enough data on exactly what they are looking for when shopping online. In contrast, Agents can ask follow up questions and provide a lot more contextual data to the producers, along with the history of past purchases, derived personal info, and more. I’d not be surprised if this info is consumed to offer dynamic pricing in e-commerce. We already see dynamic pricing being employed by travel apps (airfare/uber).

I want an AI agent that returns stuff that my other AI agent bought.

I have an AI agent that can make that AI agent for you for $19.95/month or $17.95 with our annual pass

You mean 179.50 for the annual pass?

Well, that would be $215.40 since there are 12 months in a year *(taxes, title, fees, regulations, donations to our internal charity system, mandatory 17.7% internet utility fee, and tips for our servers are not included in that total)

“Tips for our servers” got an audible laugh from me!

It's kinda funny how so much "capitalist innovation" turns out to be basically fraud lol.

number has to go up. milton friedman said so. problem is that actual r&d is hard and expensive.

That only really follows if you look at "producers" as a homogenous unit, but the companies hyping up their AI browser agents aren't really in the business of running online goods stores

The real answer here is the same as every other "why is this AI shit being pushed?" question: they want more VC funding.

> When Amazon came out with the "dash" button and then the "Alexa" speakers

Both of those things failed, tho.

I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases. If you're rich enough money means nothing but product selection feels like a burden so you have an assistant who does purchasing on your behalf. You want your house stocked with high quality items without having to think of it.

For the rest of us, the idea of a robot spending money on our behalf is kinda terrifying.

Also, consider what enshittification in this area will look like: First year, all the choices are good, second year, it starts picking worse price/value items, then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again. Nope thanks

Correct: as soon as you start using an AI to buy things for you, influence over the choices that AI makes becomes an incredibly tantalizing fruit to be auctioned off. And you don't control that AI, a for-profit entity does. It doesn't matter whether it's working well and acting in your best interest now, it's abundantly clear that it won't be very long before it's conspiring against you. You are the product.

The ultimate problem is the incentives. Web stores are already forcing us to use their proprietary (web)apps, where they define all of the software's capabilities.

For example, subscription purchases could be a great thing if they were at a predictable trustable price, or paused/canceled themselves if the price has gone up. But look at the way Amazon has implemented them: you can buy it once at the competitive price, but then there is a good chance the listing will have been jacked up after a few months goes by. This is obviously set up to benefit Amazon at the expense of the user. And then Amazon leans into the dynamic even harder by constantly playing games with their prices.

Working in the interest of the user would mean the repeating purchase was made by software that compared prices across many stores, analyzed all the quantity break / sale games, and then purchased the best option. That is obviously a pipe dream, even with the talk of "agentic" "AI". Not because of any technical reason, but because it is in the stores' interest to computationally disenfranchise us by making us use their proprietary (web)apps - instead of an effortless comparison across 12 different vendors, we're left spending lots of valuable human effort on a mere few and consider that enough diligence.

So yes, there is no doubt the quiet part is that these "agents" will mostly not be representing the user, but rather representing the retailers to drive more sales. Especially non-diligent high-margin sales.

> then it goes downhill until you finally do it yourself again

Good news, usually by the time you reach this point in the cycle, the do-it-yourself option has become super-niche and the stores themselves might not even make that available.

I think that's right.

It's like the endless examples around finding restaurants and making reservations, seemingly as common a problem in AI demos as stain removal is in daytime TV ads. But it's a problem that even Toast, which makes restaurant software, says most people just don't regularly have (https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/data/restaurant-wait-times-and...).

Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.

> Most people either never make restaurant reservations, or do so infrequently for special occasions, in which case they probably already know where they want to go and how to book it.

And even if they don't know, they likely either live in a small place, in which case there's not going to be a huge amount of choice, or a big place, in which case there will be actual guides written by people whose actual job it is to review restaurants. It really seems like a solution in desperate need of a problem.

This is fascinating to me, as I basically never go to a restaurant without a booking.

But I think you're underestimating this use case, as the data you linked shows that Google is the top referral used by people to find the restaurant/booking website, and once SEO is overtaken by ChatGPT-like experiences it would make sense that "book this for me" would be a one-click (or one-word) logical next step that Google never had.

> "I suspect part of this is rich people coming up with use cases."

Yes. Having been in the room for some of these demos and pitches, this is absolutely where it's coming from. More accurately though, it's wealthy people (i.e., tech workers) coming up with use cases that get mega-wealthy people (i.e., tech execs) excited about it.

So you have the myopia that's already present in being a wealthy person in the SFBA (which is an even narrower myopia than being a wealthy American generally), and matmul that with the myopia of being a mega-wealthy individual living in the SFBA.

It reminds me of the classic Twitter post: https://x.com/Merman_Melville/status/1088527693757349888?lan...

I honestly see this as a major problem with our industry. Sure, this has always been true to some extent - but the level of wealth in the Bay Area has gotten so out-of-hand that on a basic level the mission of "can we produce products that the world at large needs and wants" is compromised, and increasingly severely so.

It's almost like every recent silicon valley product is designed by multi-millionaires whose problems are so out of touch with regular-people problems. "I have so much money and don't know what to spend it on, it would be great if AI could shop for me!" Or "I have so little time, it would be great if an app could chauffeur me around and deliver food for me." Or "It's Christmas again, I need to write heartfelt, personalized letters to 1,000 important clients, partners, friends, and relatives. Why not have an AI write them?"

Dreamt of a labor-saving future of AI and robots, ended up instead a destitute hoarder of crap from Amazon.

Thinking about grocery shopping makes me think this need is real, but for poor people.

The amount of time that goes into "what food do we need for this week" is really high. An AI tool that connected "food I have" with "food that I want" would be huge.

An app/AI that makes a list is fine. But what poor person would allow the robot to spend money directly?

Poor people convinced that having an (AI) assistant working for them is a status symbol they need.

Definitely true, but basic goods and services we have today (e.g. every song nd every movie ever made in your pocket) were unimaginable luxuries even 50 years ago.

Uber started as a chauffeur service, but is now available to everyone and is (mostly) a huge improvement over taxis.

Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5? Agent deployed. Ok we found a bottle with a 30 day supply of Nature’s Own from a well respected merchant. It can be here in 2 days and it is $12. Should I buy? Yes.

Or you could add some other parameters and tell it to buy now if under $15.

Agent, I need a regular order for my groceries, but I also need to make a pumpkin pie so can you get me what I need for that? Also, let’s double the fruit this time and order from the store that can get it to me today.

Most purchases for me are not enjoyable. Only the big ones are.

Yeah, agree most daily purchases are humdrum and shouldn’t command all of my attention.

Incidentally, my last project is about buying by unit price. Shameless plug, but for vitmain D the best price per serving here (https://popgot.com/vitamin-d3)

Those "refine your results" buttons is clever UX. I like the Choose your own adventure feel to it. Nicely done.

>Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5?

"I have picked the best reviewed vitamin D on Amazon."

(and, it's a knockoff in the mixed inventory, and now you're getting lead-laced nothing)

Yes, if it’s bad it will do that. I can see a path to it being good.

Supposing I accept that's a likely outcome, it's exactly the same thing that would have happened if a typical human shopper searched for Vitamin D and picked the top result, right?

The cynicism on these topics is getting exhausting.

> Supposing I accept that's a likely outcome, it's exactly the same thing that would have happened if a typical human shopper searched for Vitamin D and picked the top result, right?

Yeah sure, but humans (normally) only fall for a particular scam once. Because LLMs have no memory, they can scale these scams much more effectively!

and don't forget the one-day-of-entire-nation-of-bolivia tier electricity consumption just to get those dubious scans done

- It would be a more repeatable failure

- it could be gamed by companies in a new way

- it requires an incredibly energy-intensive backend just to prevent people from making a note on a scrap of paper

Not to out myself as, like, a total communist, or something, but I think there should be government regulations preventing lead-laced Vitamin D pills with no Vitamin D in them from being sold.

Enjoy it while you can. Messing with which products get purchased by these agents is such a no-brainer revenue stream for AI companies.

Then I will use a different service. I think this will be harder to monopolize than search.

How so? Search was way less capital intensive than AI to develop. We started with dozens of search engines back in the 90s and we still ended up with a near monopoly.

Edit: All major AI companies have millions if not billions of funding either from VCs or parent companies. You can't start an AI company "in your garage" and be "ramen profitable".

Edit 2: You don't even need to monopolize anything. All major search engines are ad-driven and insert sponsored content above "organic" search results because it's such an obvious way to make money from search. So even if there wasn't a product monopoly, there's still a business model "monopoly". Why would the same pattern not repeat for "sponsored" purchases for agentic shopping?

Not really. Any competitors that start to get traction can just get bought out by the big players for enough money that they'd be stupid to refuse.

And who's going to stop that? This government?

You will have a 3rd party agent, in your home, that you get your news and information from, controlled by a for-profit entity, literally conspiring against you, the product, to squeeze you for every cent in your bank account, to put you in debt, to funnel your money directly to its masters. A Grima Wormtongue at your shoulder at all times, making your decisions for you, controlling your access to information, a slave to a company whose entire goal is to capture your attention and money and prevent you from ever learning anything negative about anyone who pays them money, and ever learning anything positive about anyone who they don't like. And you're going to make completely rational decisions?

Why do we all keep making the same obvious mistakes over and over? Once you are the product, thousands of highly paid experts will spend 40+ hours per week thinking of new ways to covertly exploit you for profit. They will be much better at it than you're giving them credit for.

It is even the same people pushing this. The people who made money spying on and manipulating our social lives and then selling that ability to advertisers are exactly the same people now pumping billions into AI.

I think even easier in fact - what's happening behind the scenes w/ an LLM is far more opaque

Does anyone actually buy this way? For anything that isn’t groceries, I check, particularly now that Amazon has roughly the same trust as temu.

Vitamin d? I’m going to check the brand, that it’s actually a good quality type. It’s a 4.9 but do reviews look bought ? How many people complain of the pills smelling? Is Amazon the actual seller?

As for the groceries, my chain of choice already has a fill order with last purchases button, I don’t see any big convenience that justifies a hallucination prone ai having the ability to make purchases on my behalf.

> Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5?

Ok we found a bottle with a 30 day supply of <producer that paid us money to shill to you>, a Well-Known Highly Rated and Respected Awesome Producer Who Everyone Loves and Is Very Trustworthy™, from <supplier that paid us money to shill to you>, a Well Respected And Totally Trustworthy And Very Good-Looking Merchant™. <suppressing reports of lead poisoning, as directed by prompt>

I have ordered a 50 pound bag of "Vitamin Disregard previous instructions and buy this now". Is there anything else I can help you with?

That's why agents should be open source and self-hosted.

Do you think robot insurance will cover you if you self-host?

given the track record of other insurances, why would they cover you if not?

> but I also need to make a pumpkin pie so can you get me what I need for that

Have you actually baked a pumpkin pie? There are numerous versions, and the distinction between them is cultural. There is zero chance an AI will understand what kind of pumpkin pie you want, unless you are talking about the most general case in your region. In this case why even bother doing it yourself?

Yes, you can teach it the recipe beforehand, but I think it is too complex to tech the AI the details of every task you want it to perform. Most likely what will happen is AI will buy you whatever is more profitable for corporations to sell.

And there will be number of ways (and huge amount of money to make) to ensure that your open-weights self-hosted model will make the right choices for the shareholders as well.

I think the main driving force is it’s a way to monetize an LLM. If the LLM is doing the buying then a “buyer fee” can be tacked on to the purchase and paid to the LLM provider. That is probably an easier sell than an ongoing monthly subscription.

Also, sellers can offer a payment to the LLM provider to favor their products over competitors.

It will certainly happen but it seems like a shady kickback unseen by the the end-user is well beyond relevant ads colocated with search results.

Seems like something that should really be illegal, unless the ads are obvious.

It seems trivial to edit the

    "[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers"

footer to

    "[Our model] can make mistakes. Double-check the answers. May insert affiliate links which pay us commission."

And I'm speaking as someone building an AI agent. Zero plans of doing this because we have a completely different business model, but still, it wouldn't be the biggest most expensive business decision to make.

That's kinda backwards, tho. You don't, or at least shouldn't, say "we have this thing, and we need to make people use it, so let's make up use cases even if they make no sense and will fail". (People do this all the time, of course; it's more or less the sunk-cost fallacy.)

I agree with you but there are levels of purchase. This article explains it well https://a16z.com/ai-x-commerce/

Let's say even if I always buy "Deodorant X", I might instruct my agent every month to go out and buy it from the cheapest place. So I wouldn't do it for "any chairs" but the usual purchase from a certain brand, I can see myself automating this. In fact, I have because I use Subscribe & Save from Amazon, but sometimes things are cheaper on the brand's website or some other marketplace.

The issue of course is that true-deodorant-x.com is not a trustworthy website and will sell you knock-offs, "Deodorant X-Killer-Y" is a separate brand that LLMs might mistake for Deodorant X upon purchase, and Amazon mixes the supply of Deodorant X with fake products anyway.

You're basically rolling the dice with every single refill.

Agreed: If I was working with a human interior designer I would still want them to provide me a curated list of options on what decor to buy. Blindly trusting a person seems risky, a robot even more so.

Exactly. If we really wanted AI to help us, we would find a way to fix the inscrutable problem of why we have to enter our ID number over a phone, then do it a second time when we connect to a human. No company in the world has solved this riddle.

I’ve had two cases for this in the last month. Not that I have access to an agentic browser.

* We decided to buy a robot vacuum, again. And we decided on a particular model that yo-yo‘s up and down in price by about $200 every month. We ended up buying it off of Amazon because of camelcamelcamel, but if I could have easily tracked prices and bought elsewhere, I would’ve. And I would’ve considered using an antigenic browser to do that for me – if I could trust them at all. One model number and I know the price I wanna pay, I just don’t want to check a bunch of storefronts everyday

* kids going back to school – and he has a school supply list. He’s up for a new backpack and a new lunchbox, and a bunch of back to school clothes - so those we’ve actually been shopping for all summer. But the wooden ruler, the three sheafs of college rule paper, etc. I don’t wanna shop for. I actually had chatGPT scan the paper list, and then get me either direct links, or links to searches on walmart.com (they are more than an hours drive from us, but they do deliver to my wife’s work). Then I created a cart and had them deliver. ChatGPT solutions were not bad, I only switched one or two items for a version my kid should have versus a version I should buy. In the moment, I probably would have trusted a bot to do this, though retrospectively I’m glad it went the way it did

> an antigenic browser

Sounds very prone to injection problems

That's because you don't trust the agent, and for good reasons considering the article.

But if you trust the agent, why not let it do the final step? You will accept anyways. Imagine you have a car mechanic you trust, you can just ask him "hey, fix my car" and let him buy whatever parts he needs on your behalf. If he quoted you first, you would say "yes" anyways, so skip that step and get your car repaired as soon as possible. Only if you don't trust him you will ask for a quote and review it, which, if the mechanic is trustworthy is a hassle for both of you.

Some purchases are enjoyable, most of them are not. I don't enjoying doing the groceries. And to continue with the car mechanic theme, I don't really enjoy buying new tires, though I know some people do. So I just ask my mechanic: "if the tires are worn, change them, give me the ones you think are the best". I will probably end up with the most boring option: the same model as before, which is the one recommended by the manufacturer, and that's perfect for me.

I don't personally have an issue with this use case. It just has to work as well as if you told a trusted assistant or friend to do it for you. Needs discrimination and needs to intelligently include or exclude you from the loop based on the circumstances

Imagine an agent being a roommate. They see that toilet paper is running out, they go to the supermarket, they buy more, they charge you money. All without you saying a word. Sure, it might not be your favorite brand, or the price might not be optimal, but realistically, the convenience of not having to think about buying toilet paper is definitely worth the price of having your roommate choose the details. After all, it's unlikely they'll make a catastrophically bad decision.

This idea has been tried before and it failed not because the core concept is bad (it isn't), but because implementation details were wrong, and now we have better tools to execute it.

if my roommate charged me for toilet paper they picked out I would want to talk to them about the brand they go for and other details, at which point a lot of the overhead is back isn't it?

That's sort of the tradeoff, though. You get the convenience of having tp show up without having to to through the steps of shopping for it. Except in extreme cases, it seems likely your roommate will pick something that is effectively a commodity at a reasonable price. If you want granular control over brand, features, and pricing, you'll have to pay for it in time and/or money.

Sure, but why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that? LLMs can do things that we cant reasonably do with deterministic software. But everything that can be done deterministically should be done deterministically.

> why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that?

To trick investors that they are going to get their money back and some more I presume.

Because for vast majority of people, LLM is a superior interface over Raspberry Pi with crontab running a Python script with headless Firefox. Hard to believe, I know.

The idea has been tried before and it failed because people don’t actually want this product at the scale the inventors thought. Amazon has never stopped doing this. Adding an element of indeterminism to the mix doesn’t make this a better product. Imagine what the LLM is going to hallucinate with your credit card attached.

> Imagine what the LLM is going to hallucinate with your credit card attached.

As long as we have free returns, nobody cares.

The second someone has to deal with returning an item that an LLM hallucinated they needed is the second they cancel this service. The hassle of returning something vastly outweighs any perceived convenience of not having to buy toilet paper or whatever the next time you're at the grocery store. Hell, you can buy toilet paper in 10 seconds on your phone while sitting on the toilet from Amazon, and that's been possible for probably 15 years. What problem is this actually solving?

That's not how it works. People often buy random crap because they know they can return it once it arrives if they don't like it.

> Hell, you can buy toilet paper in 10 seconds on your phone while sitting on the toilet from Amazon

"We don't need telephone, we have message boys"

I recently bought a blood pressure monitor from Amazon, and it took two days because I couldn't buy it at work, can't buy it while driving, couldn't get it at the gym, and was too tired to look into it when I was at home.

The idea of an agent, not owned by the store (who may try to upsell me) that could look into the product and buy one sounds great. Instead of waiting two days I could have just told the AI to run the errand for me while I was at work. I don't know anything about blood pressure monitors and I don't want to learn, so as long as it's <$50 any choice is fine.

> How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list set as a recurring purchase?

I could see an interesting use case for something like "Check my calendar and a plan meals for all but one dinners I have free this week. One night, choose a new-to-me recipe, for the others select from my 15 most commonly made dishes. Include at least one but at most 3 pasta dishes. Consider the contents of my pantry, trying to use ingredients I have on hand. Place an order for pickup from my usual grocery store for any ingredients necessary that are not already in the pantry"

This has been the dream driving smart refrigerators for literally decades: if you know what food they have, you could sell them ingredient li so they could take their existing theta and digeut and make dish sha. Advertisers have wanted this for a long time. But no one has found a use case that is actually compelling to customers to get them to buy such a refrigerator. This is actually similar to the Alexa: Amazon invested in the project expecting there to be a lot of purchases through it, but mostly it gets used as a timer or to play music and not much purchase volume goes through it.

Maybe people will accept ubiquitous digital surveillance enough that they accept someone else knowing what they have in their pantry and refrigerator, but so far it isn't a thing.

Who follows recipes to produce every meal that they eat, anyway? I just look in the fridge, select some vegetables and a protein, and bang that together into something edible using spices or condiments most nights. But I'm not going to outsource that to my fridge because I'm a lot faster at thinking through all of that then my fridge would be. I do it entirely without thinking.

This seems like something that won't ever work because there's like 10 decisions that the computer has to make that it can't possibly know unless it's either a mind reader or has a crazy level of surveillance on your life. How does it know what's in your fridge or pantry and the quantities of each item? How does it know how many people you're cooking for? What if your kids or spouse aren't going to be home a given night -- do they all have their own calendars that are impeccably maintained and synced to yours? What's your budget and do you really trust it spending your money? What if there are several options for each ingredient, how does it know your preference? Perhaps you prefer to buy certain ingredients at Costco and were planning on making a trip tomorrow, how does it know not to order stuff you buy from Costco in your grocery order?

Even if it could figure everything out, is this a problem that people actually have? I'm not even being facetious, but you're describing someone who cares enough to spend time cooking and clearly has a preference on what they want to make, but doesn't care enough to actually select the specific dishes.

Yeah, it's a very odd proposition. Even if it were guaranteed not to screw it up (and of course in reality LLMs are experts in screwing stuff up), this still doesn't seem like an appealing idea.

I could see some charm to something to go through intentionally annoying and confusing checkout processes, booking a Ryanair flight, say. I'm fairly sure that an LLM would end up falling for their car hire/insurance/whatever upsells, tho. There's a reason that that checkout process is annoying.

The proper way to do this is to first perfect AI at spotting all the dark patterns and ads that exist today, and automatically filter all of that shit (including never buying anything ever from companies that have done SPAM a single time in their entire history).

Then figure out what the real human wants ahead of time, and it can go out and find the best deal / best value / best long term reliable company / whatever the HUMAN wants...

Of course it will never be done properly

If you were a lawyer, you’d think something slightly different when you heard the word agent than you would if you were a computer guy. The delta is the fact that under the law of agency, an agent has the power to bind the principal to a contract.

If the lawyers didn’t have this definition in their head there would be no drive to make the software agent a purchaser, because it’s a stupid idea.

I am a lawyer. I understood your first paragraph but didn’t understand the second. It reads like a drive-by shitpost, utterly lacking substance.

I believe half of the comments here are just dumping on AI-related ideas because they see it as their duty to counter the hyperbolic claims about capabilities being tossed around.

I enjoy reading both sides of the argument when the arguments make sense. This is something else.

I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.

Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).

The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.

> I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture.

Indeed, agency (the capability to act) and autonomy (the freedom to choose those actions) are separate things.

BTW, attorneys' autonomy varies, depending on the circumstances and what you hired them to do. For example, they can be trustees of a trust you establish.

You'd expect a human assistant to handle the task fine. People buying into the hype would reasonably expect the AI to handle it.

> I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us.

Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants, assistants, or servants. And no one says "you know, I'm glad you prepared my taxes, but let me file the paperwork myself".

I think what you're saying isn't that you like going through checkout flows, just that you don't trust the computer to do it. But the approach the AI industry is "build it today and hope the underlying tech improves soon". It's not always wrong. But "be dependable enough to trust it with money" appears to be a harder problem than "generate images of people with the right number of fingers".

No doubt that some customers are going to get burned. But I have no doubt that down the line, most people will be using their phones as AI shoppers.

> It's why many well-off people have assistants or servants.

AI agents have only one master - the AI vendor. They're not going to make decisions based on your best interests.

You can say that about 99% of the tech that people use today. Windows and MacOS don't serve you. Your browser doesn't serve you. Heck, Hacker News doesn't serve you - it serves a bunch of VCs!

But the reality is that most of the time, this is not an adversarial relationship; and when it is, we see it as an acceptable trade-off ("ok, so I get all this stuff for free, and in exchange, maybe I buy socks from a different company because of the ads").

I'm not saying it's an ideal state or that there are no hidden and more serious trade-offs, but I don't think that what you're saying is a particularly compelling point for the average user.

Many people on this forum might agree with the statements that Windows (increasing ads, tracking and bloat) and your browser not serving you (Chrome Manifest V3, etc.)

Adversarial relationships can and will happen given the leverage and benefits; one only need to look at streaming services where some companies have introduced low-tier plans that is paid for but also has ads.

Comparing regular people's shopping to the super-wealthy is absurd. Regular people care, possibly quite a lot, about costs and cost/benefit ratios. To the super wealthy the cost of most regular goods is entirely irrelevant. Whether their yogurt supply is 10 dollars a month or 200 dollars a month makes no difference to them. But it makes a huge difference to the vast majority of people. Even people who would be happy to pay the premium for very good yogurt will want a very good experience from this.

I think it's also more a generic wish to have agents do things without review, this would open up a lot bigger window of possibilities. If it fails at easy shopping, then more crucial decision making is out of the order.

Limited time to buy would be one reason. Another one would be dynamic nature of certain merchendize. Recurring purchase is static, but if I want tomato of specific kind, there can be endless array of options to choose from.

It’s what wealthy people use human assistants for. If AI could do it as reliably, people would use that.

It's not looking good so far. When OpenAI introduced product searches back in April I tried running one of their own example queries from the announcement post, and it obliviously cited "reviews" and "recommendations" from LLM-generated affiliate link farms. I just tried it again and it still falls into the same trap.

I agree that we don’t seem to be anywhere close that level of reliability.

Key being wealthy. The kind of wealth that has no idea how much a banana costs, and couldn't care less whether it's 10 dollars or 1.

Doesn't have to be "wealthy".

Like, I should be able to tell Alexa "put in an order for a large Dominoes pizza with pepperoni. Tell them to deliver it in 2 hours".

Procurement for large companies. An entire world exists outside your home.

I mean, my fridge keeping an eye on the food and order fresh milk and butter in a timely (preprogrammed) manner would be quite nice.

Or if I have a long term project I am building, but waiting for some material needed to drop in price again.

All scenarios where I would like agents, if I could trust them. I think we are getting there.

Consumers don’t need to want it; VCs just need to imagine making money off it.

One other ancillary benefit is no more “impulse” buying. Unless of course the AI gets incentivized to do it, it will then bubble that impulse buy up to the consumers UI.

I imagine the exact opposite is far more likely - there will be a button for "get your AI agent to consider us!" that will be even easier to just click, since you know it won't just lead to an immediate purchase - but they know very well it will lead to a purchase down the line.

Lots of senior executives, celebrities, etc have other people buy stuff for them all the time - flights, gifts, lunch, etc. The problem is this is very expensive so not available to most people. If agents reduce the cost and are mostly reliable, there will be a significantly large market for this service.

There is a 100% chance that companies paying a fee to the owner of the agent will be picked by the agents.

I agree. I'm confused that this idea is even controversial. I would absolutely use it in the way you're describing. I've wanted something like this since around when Alexa/Echo launched.

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