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Comment by strulovich | Hacker News Reader

I recently needed to buy some hardware for a piece of furniture.

Ran Codex, it found it for 18% less than what I found in the top Google results. It did it by finding smaller shops, applying a discount code, subscribing to a newsletter for a better code after approval, and took into account the shipping (by placing it in the cart and going to checkout) all to get me the best price.

I’m guessing without it I would have spent much more time on it and paid the original price I saw.

If you use AI agents well, they can easily save you more money than they cost, and saving money is something most people are pretty excited about.

(Disclosure: OpenAI employee)

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>to get me the best price

How do you know it's the best price ?

Found the evals fan!

  Hi Omer,

  I think that is a use case where I'm sure an AI agent does well
  right now, but I have 2 follow-up thoughts based on it and what
  it is means that this is one of the best use case for AI online
  commerce so far.

  My first thought was that this is a quite limited application as
  most of shopping (online & retail) is not spent comparing prices
  and is instead spent on finding what product to buy in the first
  place. I believe this "shopping fun" and exploration of multiple
  options is not going away any time soon as those are some of the
  most attractive parts of the whole experience.

  I also think that the price comparison websites that exist, e.g.
  geizhals.de here in Germany (includes most e-commerce shops, and
  shipping information), are pretty good already and AI only being
  a better version of that would be quite a sad turn of events and
  with ads (and commission systems?) potentially coming to ChatGPT
  in the near future the incentives to find the best price are rly
  misaligned and I have doubts that people will trust results from
  ChatGPT. We already saw this as Google's sponsored links evolved
  to show whoever spent the most for the placement. Paid providers
  without ads and commissions might fare better though.

edit: paragraph 3 is already happening: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563386

I mean, that's cool and all, but the numbers are really going to shift when it accidentally goes off and orders that same hardware from every vendor in your local region and the top 5 online results for comparison.

It's the same problem as all other LLM solutions (that I hope OpenAI is working on!) it's non-deterministic, and there's no way for the user (or model provider) to know what the distribution of possible outcomes is. This just gets compounded when multi-call harnesses come onto play.

Thanks. This is genuinely a cool usage example.

How did you run this? Web interface, desktop app, CLI?

How did you complete the final transaction?

its going to get worse though as cloudflare keeps blocking more and more

I‘m using mostly the browser automations for things like that now. Same for research - ChatGPT is banned from reading many pages, but Codex can read anything I can.

But isn’t it funny that Cloudflare is blocking AI on their pages, but on the other hand is researching and marketing things like „you can put a browser in a CF worker“

Their browser workers won’t get blocked. Same with all big vendors, keep out small competitors enjoy access yourself and sell it to a select few partners.

The sites that do that won't be getting money from my and others' agents. Guessing that's going to become more and more of a problem for those sites.

I expect a small site that undercuts the top Google results by 18% with a sign-up discount probably isn't profitable on those orders, so blocking agents would save them money - it's not like someone using agents in that way is going to have any loyalty to shopping from that site in the future.

If no one can find your site because you block agents, that won’t do much good either.

Yeah, I mean if that's the case, then said small sites are probably headed for extinction, and agents won't have anything to work with other than whatever the top Google result is anyway.

And yours and other's agents will probably remain an insignificant and invisible customer base anyway.

My crystal ball is as good as anyone's, but if "agentic shopping" ever becomes mainstream, you can be sure that the vast majority will ask their phone (i.e. Google, i.e. Google Shopping) what the best price is anyways.

Sure, Google could be their agent, or ChatGPT, or Claude, or whatever local model the person is running. The big guys might all have the results cached so they don't have to rerun the crawl. Whatever their choice of agent, it seems pretty clear that almost everyone's going to use them, they're way too useful not to.

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