Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

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I never have a search problem.

I need either information, a service or a product. Or information about a service or a product.

I never need a search, a website or an app. That's never the problem I'm trying to solve.

Search, websites and apps are the tools I have to use (currently) to solve my problems. In the process I have to:

- deal with the fact that the interest of the makers of the app or website do not align with mine

- deal with privacy invasions/ads/notifications

- deal with things being phrased disingenuously

- deal with apps needing to update, website being broken/bandwidth wasted

And most importantly, unless two vendors implemented an integration together, I have to integrate their services myself!

I never want to leave the chat. I want to do all my transactions from the chat. All of them. On my terms. With my prompts.

Whoever facilitates that can take a 5-30% cut on all my online transactions.

Examples:

- book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro

- send every contact ive emailed with from my work email in the last year a Christmas card with a funny but professional pun about the invention of the steam engine. Send it to their work address.

> - book me a highly rated hotel in Berlin around 100 euro p/n most suitable for a staycation for next week Monday to Friday. Make a reservation near that hotel for the highest rated traditional German cuisine restaurant with a price per plate of 20-30 euro

I imagine this will go about as well as if you chose to purchase an apartment purely on the basis of the real estate agency's description.

This is what I do now on booking.com. If you have a smarter strategy let me know. But whatever the strategy is: it can be automated.

I also spent a lot more time on the choice where I live than the hotel in going to stay at for a week. Weird.

And although ChatGPT currently doesn't have up to date information about hotels or the ability to book it (a simple booking.com plugin would enable that though), it is smart enough to either pick a hotel with remote working facilities or consider one with coworking spaces nearby.

I don't know if it's a smarter strategy, but you can send a travel agency your list of requirements and they'll send you back a quote. My parents' generation are probably the only people that still use agencies, but it works for them.

It takes longer than a search query, but they don't want the hassle of coordinating logistics, and have some peace of mind that they're getting what they asked for.

So what's the bussiness model of the travel agency?

- they take a cut

- they are neutral because they want repeat bussiness

- they are personalised around your requirements

- they take care of the little details

It's exactly what I'm describing here, except automated. Because at heart their work is analyst work and thats exactly what you can automate with a LLM

What makes you think those results would be neural, and not sponsored/SEOed the same way everything is these days? What makes you think the machine works for you and not the advertisers? Also, to this day, LLMs/ANNs are not capable of explaining their outcome, and you won't argue/reason with them. That's a pretty big difference if you ask me.

>What makes you think those results would be neural, and not sponsored/SEOed the same way everything is these days?

Because it would be the less profitable bussiness.

>Also, to this day, LLMs/ANNs are not capable of explaining their outcome, and you won't argue/reason with them

How would I be able to tell that your response is human and not a LLM?

I definately can argue within a chat thread. They can also provide a plausible sounding explanation.

We know due to the nature of the technology that that explanation (sounding rational, deductive) isn't the truth.

We are just not all ready to accept all the same shortcomings also apply to humans.

Very well said. Thank you for the great thread.

> Because it would be the less profitable bussiness.

How is this different from Google?

>> What makes you think those results would be neural, and not sponsored/SEOed the same way everything is these days?

> Because it would be the less profitable bussiness.

How so? Considering that almost everything on the web right now runs on ad revenue, why would they pass on the opportunity to cash on that if they do no worse than the rest? Especially considering how lucrative those referrals might be, with our lack of preparedness countering those with traditional ad blocking techniques and being more susceptible due to inexperience.

> We are just not all ready to accept all the same shortcomings also apply to humans.

Because they do not. If you hire a human to do a job for you, you are bound by a contract (and protections, and recourses and enforcement). In the end you will be able to know whether you got robbed into a referral scheme and that's bad for business. With this kind of AI, the result is all you get (technically there is no way to explain it), which gives unfair deniability. Regulators might end up ruling whole classes of algorithms as unfit for purpose/deceptive, and I would personally applaud that. We are just at the beginning of all that and we should focus on developing the technology so it keeps working for us reliably, and not against us or under undetermined circumstances.

> except automated.

The devil is always in the details. A travel agency builds contacts with airlines, hotels, tour groups etc, so they can have a backup option available if your first preference is not. That requires humans.

An AI system that is simply browsing through the same websites a human would is going to come up with a lot of "no" responses for specific booking requests, or will simply quote higher prices once the booking websites figure out how to detect them.

I'm not suggesting OpenAI is maintaining those contacts. I'm suggesting booking.com will upload an API integration into the ChatGPT platform. Just like they uploaded an app into the AppStore.

Perhaps they will try to up the price on this platform compared to others. But only until AirBnB comes to compete on this platform too (and uploads their API integration)

It's a platform game.

There was a time when Google tried to index everything and afterwards came a time when everything tried to be indexed by Google. Once you are the default, they have to be there and they will have to compete with others there.

And as long as the chat protects users from losing control over their intent, that's where the users will be and that's where you will need to be offering your products to be viable. Obviously at that point the regulators come knocking..

Assuming there would only be one player. There won't be, but for now only OpenAI is actually aware of the opportunity and Microsoft doesn't even seem to understand it's a platform game now and not an ad game.

I would add: "Open an incognito window because I don't feel like seeing targeted ads for the random crap I'm curious about."

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