Comment by weitendorf
10 hours ago
The inline browser the agent uses that you can take control of or watch is awesome! This is something I built a lot of tools to do in the past year (including a similar inline UX/image + click pass through) but having it Just Work in a remote, fully managed client for free is extremely convenient and useful.
But… this feels like a UX that won’t last once a significant portion of consumers and purchases adopt it.
Either the network traffic is getting proxied through my client (effectively making each user a residential scraper for meta’s crawler) or it’s between meta’s servers and the sites, which puts site operators in a difficult position: if real customers are making purchases through this interface and throttling/blocking meta’s IPs makes you invisible to them and meta’s userbase, you don’t want to block that traffic.
But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
> But now every consumer in the world can just ask a question or say “check all these prices and sites for a thing I want” and go do something else, right out of the box for free, and have thousands of page loads and site interactions fire off for them.
> Bypassing the branding/marketing funnels or intended UX (cf. vc twitter abusing resy thru instinct) of sites, through some kind of proxy client amplifying the traffic a human would create, with the ability to let anybody scrape or interact directly with a site’s backend… definitely a consumer win, but seems unsustainable.
I think this is a foregone conclusions. Traditional internet marketing is dead - including funnels and dark patterns.
Your example is about helping a consumer navigate a market to get the best product and I think it’s bang on.
Too many sectors of the economy sell the lie that they are operating as a free market when in reality they are confusopolies that inflate their margins by being tricking me into buying the worse product.
I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me, so I can choose without having to be dragged through deal terms salad.
Choose from $9.99 for 1000 minutes then 12c/min and maximum 400 minute per day, $12.99 for 2000 minutes then 10c/min local only, both with optional NationalTalkXtra add on for $1.99, or $14.99 for unlimited minutes up to 1000 minutes per day, and 2c/min thereafter except on weekends with our $2.99 WeekendPlus addon…
For the most part I feel the same way, and actually think it has the potential to completely change how e-commerce/web browsing work once it plays out, to the benefit of the client/consumer.
But, I can definitely see a fair argument from the e-commerce businesses that stand to lose from that, that by removing their control over the shopping experience in favor of an opaque agent, they lose the ability to effectively communicate with their customers. Or to provide a coherent/smooth purchasing flow where important stuff like price/dates/shipping are properly surfaced to the user.
That argument would I think be hard to separate from the desire to corral customers into their marketing brochure and convert site visitors into purchasers without churn. But it is true that the LLM in the middle could consistently miss things, or have weird biases/preferences that force vendors to rebuild their sites around LLM tics instead of actual people, janky harnesses that go unnoticed by end users but cause missed sales due to stale data or blind spots, etc.
Also, demoting their sites to glorified databases with a shipping/fulfillment API will give the buyer agent’s provider a lot of power over them and break their ability to establish branding/repeat-customers. Those are the only ways they can reliably carve out margin that otherwise gets whisked away by the advertising platforms pitting them in a zero-sum competition for placement. So it’s possible it could starve out or kill e-commerce the same way Google’s changes to search (the ai box and inline info) hurt the ad-funded websites their info came from.
> I can’t wait to have an agent navigate and summarize my options for me
You must gave no idea how susceptible agents are to marketing! I used agents in conjunction to my own research on a niche item lately and while it was helpful for showing some things I hadn’t considered it was dead wrong, frequently about a lot of stuff. But by all means, give up more control
That’s really interesting, and you’re right, I had assumed an agent could be instructed to treat all vendor copy as biased to the point of being hostile!
I also don’t think I’d ever hand the credit card over to an agent. I just want a summary of what it has found and what it intends to do before pressing “pay”.
I think ChatGPT work (web) uses the client browser for browser use, butn not sure. So it should be possible.
[flagged]