For me, this is seriously impressive, and I already use LLMs everyday - but a serious "Now we're talkin" moment would be when I'd be able to stand outside of Lowes, and talk to my glasses/earbuds "Hey, I'm in front of lowes, where do I get my air filters from?"
and it tells me if it's in stock, aisle and bay number. (If you can't tell, I am tired from fiddling with apps lol)
I would guess that most companies will not want to provide APIs that an agent could use to make that kind of query. So, the agent is going to have to use the app just like you would, which looks like it will definitely become possible, but again, Lowes wants the human to see the ads. So they're going to try to break the automation.
It's going to take customers demanding (w/$) this kind of functionality and it will probably still take a long time as the companies will probably do whatever they can to maintain (or extend) control.
As for data, I can name several major retailers who expose the stock/aisle number via a public api. That information is highly available and involved in big dollar tasks like inventory management.
Companies can inject ads into their own LLMs, sure. But ChatGPT is somebody else's LLM.
Your point about retailers exposing stock/aisle number via a public API surprises me. What do you mean by public? What's the EULA look like? Exposing stock/aisle number via API for the purpose of inventory management is not a use case that would require making API access public.
(But yeah, I guess they will want it, and break any reasonable utility from their stores on the process. That's what everybody does today, I'm not holding my breath for management to grow some competence out of nowhere in the future.)
Google has always made it hard to avoid clicking the “ad” immediately above the organic result for a highly specific named entity, but where it’s really struck me is as Amazon has started extracting “sponsorship” payments from its merchants. The “sponsored” product matching my search is immediately above the unpaid organic result, identical in appearance.
That kind of convergence suggests to me that the Lowe’s of the world don’t need to “show the ad” in the conventional sense, they just need to reduce the friction of the sale—and they stand to gain more from my trust and loyalty over time than from a one-off upsell.
I’m reminded of Autozone figuring out, on their dusty old text consoles, how to just ask me my make/model/year, and how much value and patronage that added relative to my local mom-n-pop parts store since I just knew all the parts were going to be right.
- People want agency.
- Once people have comfort and trust that it does things right enough of the time, people no longer want agency.
That threshold varies task-by-task and person-by-person.
Automation tech frees up time but takes away agency and opportunity in exchange.
Empowerment tech creates opportunity and increases agency, but it needs you to have time and resources, and these costs can easily increase existing gaps between social classes.
"Computer, buy some stock"
*** buys 100 lots of tesla without a prompta punk inversion of this would have been naming one's band "various artists" in the early years of MP3 players.
In fact I'm fairly certain I've heard of a group actually doing this, but somehow I can't place the name.
This is called an "employee" and all you need to do is pay them. If you don't want to do that, then I have to wonder: Is what you want slavery?
Either way I hope you get what you want, it rarely ends well for the slave master regardless of how reductive they get to justify their actions.
I don't want to chat with computers to do basic things. I only want to chat with computers when the goal is to iterate on something. If the computer is too dumb to understand the request and needs to initiate iteration, I want no part.
(See also 'The Expanse' for how sci-fi imagined this properly.)