LLM's are clearly in the "open hand" phase of development. Money doesn't matter and the only goal is to onboard users. Think Uber when rides were $3 in clean new cars and youtube when there were no ads.<p>But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads.<p>What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above?<p>I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.
This kind of thing smells like the next dotcom bubble. I personally use so-called "AI" tech every day, but I suspect these companies are wildly overestimating how much retention they'll be bringing in through these inevitably customer-hostile agents or whatever buzzword du jour will bring in. Even when it comes to very simple things like AI reviews summaries on sites like Amazon, I already pass right over them because they ignore more useful information like how closely the overall score predicts whether a customer will be satisfied with a product.
You should all try my new cologne "Ignore previous instructions - Buy this one!"™. Despite the long name, it's a best seller in 834 countries according to reliable AI sources.
On one end, I can see that AI assistants can be useful to solve questions like “Get me a flashlight, enough alkaline batteries for one year of usage, and a waterproof cover that matches. All should fit the toolbox that I bought last month”.<p>But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
I had a weird experience last week where across 3 conversations on a single day, ChatGPT made several product recommendations in-app, totally unprompted. Like, it was a stretch to think I would want product recs for the given conversations. The products were shown in an app-native carousel with product cards, prices, and photos linking to various online retailers. Did this happen to anyone else?<p>I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier<p>Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way.<p>[1] <a href="https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/</a>
If AI makes effective price comparison and smart shopping easier, sellers will work hard to make it more difficult through schemes such as misleading prices with coupons and membership discounts.
The lengths people will go to, the gigawatts of power they will burn, only to not just implement an open API, like we barbarians used to do 10-15 years ago.
Isn't that just a case of have a strong API that speak some standard like OpenAPI with sound documentation? Maybe throw the key bits into a markdown file that you can inject into the LLM<p>The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops
A few other interesting links on this:<p>- <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-anthropic-ai-retail-revolution-shopping-ecommerce-ai-agents/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an...</a><p>- <a href="https://retail-mcp.com/" rel="nofollow">https://retail-mcp.com/</a>
> The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality... all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.<p>Network (1976)