Comment by haritha-j
1 month ago
Or probably even wrose, it actually shifts the attention and the wandering. That phase will happen inside the LLM, where the LLM decides which link to suggest, i.e. whoever pays the LLM the most. And worse yet, that will apply not just for products, but for platforms, so if amazon pays chatgpt more than ebay does, there goes your sale.
An AI-Agent browsing eBay for a "widget" for a given individual will also likely not be browsing eBay's advertising listings (sponsored and promoted listings [1]) which would potentially equate to a loss in ad revenue for eBay. So there is likely a "protect the advertising moat" aspect to their "ban" as well.
[1] Given how hard eBay pushes sellers to purchase the sponsored and promoted listing tiers (at an additional fee of course) implies they make some nice revenue stream from these advertisements.
This assumes the LLM ecosystem stays centralized. Open source models running locally or on user-controlled infrastructure flip this - the agent works for you, not for whoever pays the model provider.
The race is already happening: open weights models are getting good enough that "your personal shopping agent" doesn't need to phone home to a company with ad incentives. The future probably looks more like ad blockers than ad platforms - agents that aggressively optimize for user preferences, not platform revenue.
Or if eBay blocks ChatGPT while Amazon doesn't.
The same amazon that sued anthropic for their AI trying to order stuff on Amazon?
Open source models can short circuit that hopefully.