> Amazon will fight for its life to stop this.
Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?
Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?
On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic.
Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose.
It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads.
If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.
I really don't see why not. If anything, there's even more user interactions with a chatbot which means more opportunities and more context for placing targeted ads.
And why wouldn't they do an auction? There's nothing stopping them. In fact, again, it's even easier because users are not conditioned to near instantaneous results from a chatbot like they are from an internet search. Internet search also has different categories, I'm not seeing why it's a particularly different or more challenging problem re: hiring a lawyer vs searching for groceries.
In general, Big Tech will never allow itself to be just the backend to a service where another company controls the frontend and the relationship to the customer. That's how you get commoditized and ultimately replaced.
Examples: you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go"): the streaming services staunchly refuse to provide the APIs to do so. Nor is there interoperability across messaging apps to let users supply their own frontend clients. AI and MCP will go much the same way, it will be locked down as soon as it presents a business model threat.
Can you explain to me how this is different than the literal world we are currently in, where Google and web search serves as a frontend to buying $billions of products on Amazon already?
> you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go")
You've clearly not used a Roku TV, Apple TV, or Amazon Fire Stick lately :). Universal search with "click and play" and deep links into individual streaming services is table stakes for streaming TV now. Your statement here could not be more wrong, honestly.
That's the whole point here. People use web search as a product recommendation service, even though Amazon has one natively. What makes you think people won't (and they already are, in massive numbers) use chatbots for product recommendations and web search?