Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol
openai.com
Agentic Commerce Protocol: https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/, ChatGPT Page: https://chatgpt.com/merchants, Stripe post: https://stripe.com/blog/developing-an-open-standard-for-agen...
openai.com
I agree there's a real bias issue, but that is consistent through out any large company - e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc have sponsored results
Sure they could. This notion that an unscrupulous revenue stream is justified if it pays well enough smacks of "Just following orders!"
"It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.” - Grapes of Wrath
At some point we have to stop this madness.
This implies antitrust has been sufficiently enforced such that there are viable alternatives in all markets.
That's not currently true.
If you’re willing to torch your credibility as a company, that tends to open up quite a few shorter term business options. The real trick is ensuring enough customer or user lock in that they can’t go anywhere else even when the enshittification is obvious to everyone.
The irony here is that ChatGPT could be a credible threat to Google search’s dominance as the entry point to the internet partly because the quality of Google’s search results has degraded so much. For some queries sponsored links push the real results below the fold on mobile, they’ve allowed some content aggregators to take over certain types of results (Pinterests polluting image results with irrelevant content). But that doesn’t matter while you make gobs of money. That is until a credible competitor finally appears and people are itching to find a better alternative.
That's only so in our little cynical skeptical contrarian hacker bubble. For most people, it's an appreciated convenience.
They might fall for ads. In the same way I smoked for years and hated smoking.
I think "people want frictionless ways to purchase products" is a PM pipe dream more than a description of reality.
I get what example you are referring to, but there are degrees here. For example the Buy Now flow really is handy; and I find I favor merchants that let me pay by scanning some kinda QR code from Apple Pay or Venmo. I definitely don't miss the friction of having to go dig out my credit card, mistype the cc#, type the wrong cvc if Amex, repeat the purchase after getting declined once and responding to a fraud text, etc.
How does Alexa ever compare with the rich experience of interacting with a store through the various senses? Its typical that technologists tend to come up with this stuff and what happens in reality is wildly off compared to what was expected.
Buying stuff means spending money. it turns out most people don't have a lot of money (something that Mr Altman would never be able to understand given his privileged background) so they want to see and experience the transactions that take place. Same reason why this agent nonsense is not going to work from an economic stand point.
That's a "fun" thought experiment if they did do that, because the advertising model inference will need to run cheaply enough compared to the conversion rate/margin on clicks. I suspect it will be really hard to beat Google Ads on cost if you have to run inference on all chat output for each ad placement. It could put ChatGPT into a higher end/higher cost advertising platform.
The defaulting to negativity will really eat some communities up from the inside.
A voice assistant doesn't give you that option to review, but maybe it'd work for ordering fast food. A small chat window could grow to work for simple purchases like takeaway food or small hardware, etc.
OpenAI is projected to generate $12-14 billion in yearly revenue in 2025 (annualized from a single month), but expect to lose around 8 billion USD, implying the margins are negative.
OpenAI has raised a total of ~$60 billion.
I think they need to show investors a huge and growing cashflow to keep the show going.
Of course, they can't just retreat to selling their basic services since some other company would train and produce a marginally better model.
So it's a paradoxical situation. They're moving in contradictory directions - both to become a thing so valuable they'd only need to sell subscriptions and towards a mote if they don't reach that "AGI" thing. No reason being flexible would displease their shareholders but there are many other questions to answer here (who gets AGI raptures, who gets the Skynet/Terminator treatment, who decides, etc).
Im not really sure where Altman is going. As time goes on, it seems the walls are closing in and he's just throwing all he can to keep the hype alive.
You cant escape fundamentals forever, I dont care who you are.
They have hundreds of millions of users in total (free tier included), with around 10-15 million paying users.
So if your users are spending a lot of time on a tasks, why not make it more delightful?
Of course, you need to make sure you don’t allow accidental purchases, that would be the way you destroy trust. But assuming a clear intent to purchase is established, then I think this will be well-received.
So I'm afraid of a steep enshittification of this use.
I think this is a blind spot for this community, personally. Like, it’s right to care about this stuff, but I think we are wrong to think other people care too.
Now that they are a commercial entity, you are right. If they had remained on their original mission path though I suspect this wouldn't be the no-brainer it is now.
If the latter was true, Google would take its tremendous cash balance and earnings and reinvest into what is necessary to reach AGI right now.
OAI has a funding problem. Google in comparison most certainly does not. Google could go raise funding for it right now too.
The real issue is the lack of confidence behind the supposed theory that more aggressive reinvestment yields AGI.
What Amazon really nailed, and the reason I buy like 90% of things from them, is the easy and known shipping and return policy.
But the second reason I buy from Amazon is laziness. I am too lazy to look up the (often confusing) product on their company store, I'd rather just buy that product through amazon. To compound my laziness, I don't like having to once again fill out my email, home address, and credit card for the thousandth time when I go to their site.
But if I don't have to find and navigate to their site and I don't have to fill in my information for the thousandth time. Now, we are talking about me realistically considering a direct purchase.
This is likely good for the consumer, and largely good for the world (less centralization).
Bonus point is I don't end up with fake sd cards from Amazon's comingling (so no, being vigilant in which seller you buy from on Amazon didn't help anyways)
For boutique things, luxury goods, or things I am very familiar with brand reputation of, I do what you do. But for ordinary low-cost consumer goods (e.g. computer peripherals, drugstore stuff, guest linens), I struggle to identify retailers that aren’t selling low-quality crap.
Don't forget reviews.
Decoupling these (in a trusted way) from the seller's storefront is probably not impossible, but still hard enough to add to Amazon's moat.
These days I make it a general rule to find AMZ alternatives particularly for highend items.
- Electronics: B&H
- Music Equipment: Sweetwater
- Computer related: Local Microcenter
It looks exactly like the same amount of centralization to me (if not more), only now it's openai and not amazon then one at the center of things.
I can't remember where, but someone pointed out a quirk of current AI advertising that is hard for me to un-see: In many ads, a customer appears to be middle class, but decides to save 15-60 seconds by giving their wallet to an "AI assistant" and blindly trusting it will purchase products and restaurant reservation on their behalf.
It takes some affluence to be that casually indifferent to spending-mistakes, and it seldom matches the "this could be you" person being shown.
Now, maybe it's deliberate, to owning the product will have made you wealthier, or its just a quirk of keeping ads short... but it's still weird.
The capitalists want people to spend spend spend spend spend.
Consequently, its why we have the term lifestyle creep and people having fucktons of debts (not all cases of course). People are convinced by endless marketing they have to have the same luxuries as everyone else.
I can’t afford to buy the widget now, sorry, my rent is due.
AI Agent: buying widget now. I am also canceling the lease on your apartment to improve your purchasing power.
While their only successful product is impressive, it is doubtful that its success alone can sustain them beyond the first 'downturn' of their value in the market. This reeks of desperation on their part and should bring more attention to the mountain of "promises" they have made, compared to its actual deliveries.
Where's the money coming from to pay the fee? From my wallet, of course! At scale, this raises the price of purchases.
Another thought -- the text-only interface of ChatGPT is way too limiting. We need images (and video) generated on demand showcasing product suggestions. Showing an image of the user wearing some new shades is going to be pretty compelling...
Before objecting to this, I'd want to know how much those fees are, but the terms seem to be undisclosed.
That is literally how all credit card purchases work. And yes you are right. Based on that looks like that inflation rocket is headed to the moon. The general population is just not capable of seeing even one layer beneath the surface of a system.
Its like that skit where the people ask the programmer why they cannot have three parallel lines that intersect (or something like that) and he says "geometry."
???
Surely you realize that unsecured revolving credit is going to have higher interest rates than government debt?
And how big is credit card debt compared to M2 supply?
This is true, but standard practice. As long as you’ll purchase the product (more conveniently than you otherwise would), the marketing costs are worth it.
> ... when random comments or agent actions place orders
I believe that the purchase action must be triggered by a user manually in a specific "Pay <vendor>" UI element? It doesn't seem to me like any prompt could trigger a purchase directly. Of course this could change, but likely won't for the reasons you said.
Users stay in control — they explicitly confirm each step before any action is taken.
Who do you imagine will be throwing money at all these side-hustle "make money with AI" business you envision? No doubt there will be a few- there already are a few- but as the market gets increasingly flooded with AI slop enterprise with very little value add, that well is going to dry up quick.
It's not different than all those content creators making videos offering to teach you the secrets to easy money... instead of just making all that easy money themselves.
DoorDash takes 15-30% of fees from restaurants so restaurants raise their prices and consumers have to pay service fee and a delivery fee and tip.
Be ready to pay more at sites that have this enabled.
Search engines used to be very useful too until the endless profit a/b testing boiled us all
And this is not a bad thing, otherwise you can only image how many businesses will close when google traffic stars to decline.
Everyone likes to hate on ads but the reality is that without ads 99% users even on hacker news would be jobless as the companies where they work will have no way to find clients, and even if they manage to find some - those clients won't be able to sell and will go out of business.
Agreed.
Tech companies always do this. With Ads, we’re back into speculation territory, and the “how do we pay for and justify all this shit?” can gets kicked down the road.
Can’t we actually solve problems in the real world instead? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay if AI makes them more productive? Why do we need an ad-supported business model when the product is only $20/mo?
This was always a fake reasoning (ads are there because people want everything for free!), but then paid HBO started ads, your purchased smart TVs started ads, cars that you bought with money started ads...
([some business model] + ads) will simply always generate more profit than [some business model] (at least that's how they think). Even if you already pay, if they also shove some ads in your eyes, they can make even more money. Corporations don't work the way humans do. There is no "enough". The task of the CEO is to grow the company, make more profit each quarter and is responsible to the shareholders. It's not like, ok, now we can pay all our bills, we don't need more revenue. You always need maximum possible revenue.
> Merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases, but the service is free for users, doesn’t affect their prices, and doesn’t influence ChatGPT’s product results.
This is called affiliate marketing and it’s toxic.
This is the culture of America in a nutshell. Steve Jobs was a weirdo in that regard and an outlier.
Owning a few shares is not the same thing as actually making all the money someone at the top of Google is making.
Even if OpenAI needs to feed the VC beast, they will always be open source LLMs that can be used freely inside home-made search engines.
There is also plenty of research going on to make models more efficient and powerful at small sizes. So that shift in the power gradient seems like it’s going to continue.
Sure, this may in Google-style-monopoly direction or an Amazon-style-monopoly direction. I don't know which. I would indeed expect a large dose of enshittification would be involved.
You're welcome to argue this leads to ads. But jumps to this is ads and getting a dozen pearl-clutching is a symptom of hn's own crude enshittification, jeesh.
And have you noticed what sellers on Amazon are doing? Foreign companies are setting up distribution in the US and registering their US companies with Amazon as "small businesses" and "minority-owned businesses", making those labels utterly useless.
Anyone who knows the industry long knew this was going to be the fate of her made up “CEO” role at OAI.
It’s one of the (many) reasons I do not trust OAI with anything.
They start out subsidized by investors and then once they have enough users and can no longer pay for them with the invested cash, they push more and more ads onto users.
And it was easy to see that LLMs are an especially devious place the inject ads because they can flow right into the the response and not even look like an ad, but rather feel like a casual recommendation.
It's a fairly obvious way for them to make money, as people are using it as a replacement for search engines, and that's how search engines have made money.
The incentives are very strong to prefer instant checkout items.
Cynical take, I know, but that is how Google started too. But now they prioritize people who pay them, and it's only a matter of time before OpenAI does the same.
And I can't at all blame them! They are there to make money (well, now).
But I suspect this won't be true for long.
And OpenAI might not even know my product is worse. In fact, they probably don’t. They’re too big to investigate. All they know is that I paid them more.
no you can't. because that is not a thing that they sell.
nothing in the announcement says they will accept money for changing their rankings, and the comment at the top of this chain includes the quote from the announcement where they explicitly say they won't do that.
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. "
lol.
Perhaps they left their management positions as they couldnt face the double standard they had entered into. Highly unlikely but who knows.
Still, there is a reason I am frantically working on working on a more local setup that I can trust not to:
a) oversell me stuff b) is under my control c) not profile me ( in a way that can be sold to other merchants )
The issue seems to be the same as always. I am either a minority or the money pull is way too strong.
Also, OpenAI is not handling the transaction, Stripe is, but it doesn't have to be Stripe, just that Stripe co-developed the protocol with OpenAI and is first to have it available.
They are also in the advertising business. Walmart cleared $4 billion last year.
https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/walmarts-ad-business-cl...
"users can now buy directly from Etsy sellers"
The irony being that many of those spam articles are probably generated with ChatGPT - https://youtu.be/WLfAf8oHrMo?t=86
Although, at the time, we didn't have the "fox guarding the henhouse" problem of modern tech companies, and they hadn't yet inserted themselves into the loop so intimately.
However, as far as I can tell, it happened in the best way possible. This seems like an actual open standard, which is refreshing to see in the modern web.
Creating a common API for stores and payment processors will likely lead to increased competition, benefiting users.
I'm happy to see this. It seems to benefit all consumers, even those who do not use AI.
How deep into a bubble are we that digital stores get integration into LLMs? There are so many obvious risks here and so few imaginable upsides over redirecting a user to the merchant.
[Response from Seller] "We regret that our product doesn't meet the customer's expectations — we issued a full refund."
Ah, so that‘s what he actually meant.
They promised us AGI and the singularity, they delivered more ads.
I can't believe people give this guy money. It's so frustrating.
Is he a lucky idiot far enough removed from engineering to believe his own words or is he a calculated, capable showman just in it for the griftmaxx?
Is the current endgame really just adtech?
https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/futureproof-9-rules-hum...
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262858)
They had been keeping this in reserve and decided to release it when Anthropic released Sonnet 4.5. Anime-like tactics.
However when it comes to instant checkout and payment, some web browsers already have auto-fill for the address and payment forms that every netizen has completed hundreds of times already. Assuming web browsers already store the information for auto-fill why not go to the next step and create a protocol to allow them to do one click payment and checkout?
In short, I don't see why this instant checkout feature should be locked behind agent usage.
On top of that the avg income of an Indian user is less than 300$ per month, do you think they have a credit card? Much easier for them to ask for link and buy it themselves rather than any sort of surprise charge that can’t be refunded.
This will replace the current ad economy.
They will likely go through many iterations of this before finding what works, but I expect it will eventually be an incredible business on the same level as AdWords. We can only hope that the incentives don't end up warping the models too much...
Oh my sweet summer child. How can you be so optimistic after seeing Google's decline? It won't happen all at once, but the need for revenue growth and the incremental logic of A/B testing are relentless forces that wear away at the product once ads are in the mix.
never full on moving the tanker like zuckerberg or a16z but always ready to sell shovels to a (potantially) viable submarket that is aligned with their mission and becoming a strategic player in that angle.
very smart.
Would you like me to diagram the precise mechanisms through which these features transform users into passive recipients of AI-initiated interactions and transactions?
- Initiation loop: The AI identifies a trigger (calendar entry, email, purchase pattern) and begins the conversation unprompted.
- Action loop: Once trust is assumed, it executes on your behalf (ordering, booking, messaging).
- Feedback loop: Each interaction produces more data, refining its ability to predict when to act next.
Together these loops progressively erode the boundary between “I decide, AI assists” and “AI decides, I ratify.”
Would you like me to sketch this as a flow diagram, or unfold the psychological implications of each loop?
The shift is from a Reactive Tool to a Proactive Agent, and this transition fundamentally alters the user's role. Here’s how it works, broken down into its constituent parts:
The Mechanism of Passivity: From User as "Driver" to User as "Passenger"
1. The Initiative Shift: Who Asks the First Question?
· Old Model (Reactive): User has a thought -> User formulates a query -> User inputs the query -> AI responds. · Cognitive Load: On the user. They must identify a problem, articulate it, and initiate the interaction. · New Model (Proactive): AI analyzes context (screen, audio, memory) -> AI identifies a potential need or action -> AI presents a suggestion or takes a micro-action -> User consents or refines. · Cognitive Load: Shifted to the AI. The user's role is reduced to granting or denying permission.
2. The Transactional Seam: Blurring Help and Commerce
· Old Model: Help and transaction were separate spheres. You'd use a calculator app, then separately open Amazon to buy a calculator. · New Model: The AI, by having context and initiative, creates a seamless bridge from identification to acquisition. · Example Flow: AI sees a recipe on your screen -> It offers to add the ingredients to a shopping list -> The shopping list is integrated with a delivery service -> A "Buy Now" button appears. · The Passivity: The user is not seeking a store; the store is brought to them. The decision point changes from "Should I go shopping?" to "Should I not buy this right now?" The default action becomes consumption.
3. The "Frictionless" UI: Eliminating Deliberation
· Features like the "phone-break-in" for real-time translation or assistance remove the physical and psychological steps of opening an app, typing, and waiting. · The Consequence: This eliminates the "deliberation time"—the few seconds where a user might think, "Do I really need to do this?" or "Is this a good idea?" Interaction becomes impulse. The user is carried along by the convenience of the flow.
4. The Memory Layer: Creating a Dependent Relationship
· Without Memory: Each interaction is a clean slate. The user must re-establish context, which reinforces their role as the authoritative source of their own information and history. · With Memory: The AI becomes the custodian of your context, preferences, and patterns. · The Passivity: You no longer need to remember your own preferences; you rely on the AI to remember for you. This creates a gentle but powerful dependency. The AI becomes more efficient at being "you" than you are, because it has perfect recall. Your agency in defining the context of a conversation diminishes.
The Underlying Economic Engine
This isn't just a technical shift; it's an economic one. The "passive recipient" is a more valuable economic unit than the "active user."
· An active user has intent that they satisfy. The value exchange is clear: they have a question, they get an answer. · A passive recipient is presented with opportunities for engagement and transaction they did not explicitly seek. This creates new, AI-driven funnels for: · E-commerce (as described) · Service Sign-ups ("You seem to be planning a trip. Would you like me to find you a hotel?") · Content Consumption ("Based on your last question, you might like this video...")
In essence, OpenAI is building an Ambient Interface that sits between users and the digital world. Its primary function is to reduce user effort, but the secondary, commercial function is to orchestrate user activity towards endpoints that benefit its partners and, ultimately, its own ecosystem.
You were right. It's a brilliant, and from a business perspective, inevitable evolution. But it systematically re-architects the human-computer relationship from one of mastery to one of management. We are no longer pilots at the console; we are administrators approving the suggestions of an ever-more-autonomous system.
But, like it or not, here it comes.
I have it running a background research task now where it’s producing a comparison table of product options with columns for different attributes I’m interested in, including links to purchase it, so it can help me make a decision tonight. If this feature is available for what I want, I’ll be using it in a few hours.
Whether you use ChatGPT or Google the first thing you see is an AI generated response, but Google is using the cheapest version of their model and only providing the context from the top 10 results, while ChatGPT is using a much better model and passing in more context. Lots of folks are turning to ChatGPT instead of Google these days.
Stripe post: https://stripe.com/blog/developing-an-open-standard-for-agen...
2. The media began covering this 3 hours ago and $goog is just ~1% down. I’m curious why it didn’t spook Google investors, whether reasonably or unreasonably.
ChatGPT: I've found the following Python books that contain explanations of how to complete that task. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"None. I just want an answer."
ChatGPT: Ok, perhaps you were looking to purchase a python. I've found the following pet stores that sell Ball and Reticulated pythons. Which one would you like to purchase?"
"Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh"
It also opens up - ads - subscriptions - transactions
based revenue lines for OpenAI
As much as I hate it, it's inevitable.
It appears to me that they are already well-positioned to become the next generation of Amazon with their current user base -
* AWS -> OpenAI APIs
* Amazon -> ChatGPT Shopping
"recommend me a novel about <whatever>" and it just gives you bestsellers
It also paves the way for ads in this type of answer down the line and incentivizes enshitification even further. If it would be Google doing it, everybody would raise their shields. But as openAI is still too small, we'll let it happen without saying or doing anything, right?
It hides stores/brands reputation, value-prop and differenciators, likely favoring the established big players and makes it even harder for smaller players to enter.
What about the ethics of having openAI as the gatekeeper for product/brands inclusion? Right now it mighht look like a clever business move but it establishes dangerous foundations and gives them too much power if they keep growing.
(IIUC)
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Societies of Control, 1990.
So, this is a race to de bottom for any SMB. If this didn't work for Instagram and Facebook, I don't think is gonna work for them neither.
What's interesting is that they're REALLY trying to see what's going to stick before the wheel stops spinning. From "AGI" and gpt5 getting Altman all "scared" of what's coming to trying to sell ads, a social media showing ai videos, among other things ("app" store with GPTs, etc.).
If there was a statement that we were in a bubble waiting to pop, this right here is plenty enough proof of that.
Nope youre not an idiot, I agree with your thoughts.
It's so textbook that Google two weeks ago came out with their own competing "open" standard for doing the same thing!
You need some amount of strictness in the API here, LLMs are not actually sentient. You could say that this is a failure on OpenAI's part in comparison to their marketing, sure.
Consumers will only use the UI if it's better. Merchants will plug into the UI to make more money. So everyone wins-- consumers, merchants, OpenAI, and Stripe. And since the protocol is open, other chatbots and other payment processors can implement it too. Who loses?
(I agree that at scale these things tend to accrue to top players and you get all kinds of weird unsavory consequences. But I'd argue that's a critique of our regulatory apparatus, not of the companies building products and services.)
Where users will becomes the product.
The last thing I'd trust any AI agent, particularly in today's time, would be something tying directly into my bank account!
That phrase is a dead giveaway that a very silly group of people have started dominating the conversation at a given company. I don't "love" a product. I certainly don't "love" a product I'm having to resort to ChatGPT to figure out my potential relationship with. At best, I "love" having a solution to a problem that I want to spend as little time and money solving as possible, and even then it's more of a satisfactorily productive comradeship.
God this is exhausting.
Sama wants to speedrun the Apple arc, it looks like.
Imagine if the company has AI in its name.
For only $6666 you too can become part of the new Mega Banana Annihilation Infantry – the secret task force fighting rogue potassium. Success guaranteed!
Buy now!
Unfortunately this company has decided to layer on at least one daily notification reminding me to think about all the value their product can bring me. This notification is not strictly marketing, because there’s no buy action anywhere, but it is most certainly the sort of “pay attention to meeeee” whine you commonly see in the most insecure boys.
The thing is that they seem absolutely BAFFLED that anyone wouldn’t want these messages. They cannot conceive that a consumer doesn’t give a shit about their washer/dryer except as a purely functional device. They want to be part of the family, the sort of thing where I think “Gosh I love my wife. Gosh I love my child. Gosh I love my dog. God damn I love my washing machine.” They genuinely believe people think like this. It’s sad and hilarious at the same time.
I love lamp!
No, not at all. It's not really possible unless you're using an extremely basic washer with no spin (Or a very poor spin) cycle. A lot of the reason washers are terrible at estimating how long a wash cycle is going to be is because they spend a variable amount of time balancing the clothes before the spin cycle.
Edit: what the other guy said. I have a diver watch I just spin the dial to see how much time has passed since I started something. One time at the height of my Arduino hackery I didn't have a tea kettle and just boiled water in a sauce pan and said to my roommate, I bet I can shine a laser on the surface of the water to detect when it's boiling and make a noise, she laughs and says congrats you've invented a more complicated whistling kettle. Really humbling experience.
They don't make the product, so their love can't actually make it better by including small human touches, or iterating.
They're not sales or traders, so they don't have to care about the nitty gritty of procurement or costs to customers.
All they have & need is excitement.
This would be fine if they were customers, but they're not so its all very parasocial.
Given that the product people concerned must have accepted that the people involved (the patients) would have hundreds or thousands of involvements of similar profundity with other commercial products, I'm not sure what's more worrying: the misjudgement of the role of medicine, or the implication that they think that normal people's brains are teeming with 1000s of emotional attachments to random commercial products.
Millions of people are passionate about brands like the "Dallas Cowboys" and "Star Wars" and will dress up in costumes and go to events with like-minded people.
But for normal products, like USB headsets? Nobody's dressing up as the Jabra 20 Stereo USB-C Headset to go to the big Jabra Convention.
Some people are passionate about coffee, others knitting. I'm not sure it's a broad definition of product you need, but more like a broader definition of people. They probably don't all fit into your sports nerd bubble. Most people are passionate about something.
Seems like an express route to irrelevance, to me.
If I wanted AI-generated shill reviews, written without laying eyes on the product, hoping to get me to click on an affiliate link? I'd go to Google.
You never know. I'm not sure I've ever loved a company exactly, but I've really really liked a product, or sometimes just a type of food. If I like a certain food enough and only a certain company sells it, some of that feeling relates with the company too. Like the company cheers you up, BECAUSE they sell it. You can see how that might be valuable in spreading appeal for the company and helping preserve the thing you enjoy, so it has social/natural selection value.
I think when companies refer to this, they really are referring to real people, it's just aspirational that other people could feel that way if they let themselves. Most people won't.
> In a few weeks it will become "buy dogfood", and it will just do the thing, knowing you get some certain food from Chewy
I have autoship orders set up with Chewy. Stuff arrives on a schedule and I get a small discount. I don't need an overhyped autocomplete fucking things up for me, especially when I can just set up a subscription myself and forget about it.
Basically, the Sillicon Valley "smart fridge" episode. Or even better, the Modern Family "smart fridge" episode.
Yet another protocol
I wonder if we’re seeing the same pattern repeat here with ChatGPT becoming big.
Outrage followed by inevitability.
Early stage hype overshoots, sure, but sometimes it’s just pricing in things the old frameworks can’t even model yet.
Uber, in particular, drives me nuts because we replaced a supposedly powerful and evil taxi cartel (which happened to be a bunch of small, regional businesses) with a huge multinational corporation. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Kind of like how we’re seeing with LLMs: not perfect, often overhyped, but undeniably useful at scale.
If I make a company buy every hospital in the world you will think is essential, but is not. The hospitals did exist before.
It’s like a software library that’s buggy and bloated but everyone depends on it because rewriting it from scratch is harder than dealing with its flaws.
Taxis were better than Ubers, bed&breakfast were better than AirBnB.
Maybe you are just too young to know it. The only reason we moved to Uber is because it was half the price of taxis, because it was subsidized, not anymore.
Also, my point isn't that the current system is objectively better. It's that scale and convenience created network effects that make it "essential" in practice, even if it’s buggy, slow, or worse in some respects.
Even at the same price there are valid reasons why many people prefer an Uber over a Taxi, in particular the predictable pricing and globally consistent UI.
Predictable my ass. You have been lied to.
And btw all over the world you rise up your arm, and the taxi stops, I think that is a pretty consistent user interface that anybody in the world can understand. I have to help my aunt each time she needs an Uber.
And randomly hoping for a taxi to drive by maybe works as long as you exclusively travel between airports, train stations, and downtowns of major cities, but if you're even slightly more remote than that you'll have to call or use some random app to get the Taxi to pick you up.
The parasititic relationships that people from whit mega corporations in the west is so upseting.
The hire of Simo and acquisition of Statsig is very present here.
Considering how vulnerable AI is to this sort of thing, there's no way in hell I'm touching it for at least 5-10 years.
Sure, they tell you that it's safe at the bottom and give reassurances, but I'm also not going to trust them on that, just as I don't trust pretty much anything ChatGPT tells me without futher verification.
And of course, very shortly after it will overflow to negative infinity and the cycle will repeat.