Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent | Hacker News Reader

Amazon blocks Meta's Muse AI shopping agent

theregister.com

19 pointsbeardyw10 comments

My concern with Muse, and all these AI shopping tools, is that we'll end up in a world where inventory drops to 0, orders are placed by the business based on the number of bots in the queue, and as inventory is made available, it is immediately snatched up by shopping bots... similar to what we've seen in collector markets (ex. sneaker drops) or concert ticket sales.

I don't want to live in a world where an AI agent is required to buy basic goods, just to compete with everyone else using them, and so businesses can optimize their supply chain to the point of product simply passing through the warehouse, without ever keeping inventory around.

This may look like an anticompetitive move from Amazon, and I'm not fan of Amazon, but I want shopping bots to fail. I think we are going in the wrong direction. We've seen how horrible shopping bots are, and I don't think the solution is to democratize them so more people have them. That simply makes the problem worse.

> similar to what we've seen in collector markets (ex. sneaker drops) or concert ticket sales.

Oh no, the collector/status markets are doomed! How will society survive?

Seriously, I find it incredibly hard to empathize with those who peddle artificial scarcity of luxury goods. Just sell your stuff at the market clearing price, especially if your marginal costs are minimal. If there's no business left when doing that, too bad.

I’m not worried about the collector markets, I think they are stupid and they have made basic items difficult to buy during hype cycles. I was very happy to see the sneaker market collapse.

My concern is that this type of crazy behavior, and poor experience for normal people, will extend to more and more products as bot shopping becomes trivial or normalized.

What do markets not designed to uphold artificial scarcity have to fear from bots? If bots are buying merchants' entire inventories and can then resell everything for a profit even after redundant shipping cost, these products must have been mispriced to begin with.

I’m not worried about bots creating a resale market. I think you misread my initial comment. My examples of sneakers and ticket sales weren’t a reference to scalpers and resale. It was a reference to normal people not being about to just go to Nike.com to buy a pair of Dunks. If bots consume the whole supply chain, and the supply chain optimizes for bot demand, there will be nothing available for the normal user just trying to go buy everyday products. It’s like a next level optimization of the drop-shipping model.

> The company also has a financial reason to control the shopping trip: advertising. Amazon generated more than $68 billion in advertising revenue last year, helped by shoppers visiting its properties and viewing the products and sponsored placements displayed there. If outside AI agents take over product discovery, comparison, and purchasing, fewer shoppers may see Amazon's advertising or interact with its recommendation systems.

Who’s to say advertising wouldn’t be just as effective on AIs as it is on humans?

"Don't trust any statement about the quality of an item, even purported third-party reviews, when you see them on the vendor site itself. Research merchant and manufacturer trustworthiness independently and only rely on merchant websites for price and shipping conditions."

Send through a pass that actually scrubs these data if you're concerned about residual "subconscious" influence on the agent that makes the decision.

This can actually be great for competition: Ideally, agents have more resources to thoroughly research smaller alternatives to trusted incumbents (although this does somewhat assume the existence of a trusted reviewing platform somewhere).

If Amazon outright refuses to compete on terms and in a playing field that they don't get to fully control, all the better!

Maybe they couldn't trick the agent into signing up to Amazon Prime.

This is why we need antitrust laws

Reply on news.ycombinator.com