Comment by liamconnell
2 days ago
Good point!
On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic.
Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose.
It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads.
If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.
> Can a chatbot do the same?
I really don't see why not. If anything, there's even more user interactions with a chatbot which means more opportunities and more context for placing targeted ads.
And why wouldn't they do an auction? There's nothing stopping them. In fact, again, it's even easier because users are not conditioned to near instantaneous results from a chatbot like they are from an internet search. Internet search also has different categories, I'm not seeing why it's a particularly different or more challenging problem re: hiring a lawyer vs searching for groceries.