I don’t buy it.
First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?
Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).
Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.
> So it’ll just be another middle man.
Exactly this, and not just another middleman, a middleman with an obscene burn rate that isn't close to profitability and is incentivized to ratchet up prices as soon as they can.
And then AI procurement has problems on the buyer side. Do I just blindly trust that the model is going to make the purchase as specified? Do I trust the model's search capabilities and objectivity of returning results? How do I know that OpenAI isn't running its own "marketplace", only showing me options to buy that they want me to see while filtering out less desirable options for them?
It's a fundamentally less transparent experience than Amazon.
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