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Grok Bot

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Re: Grok Bot

#301
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: Companies have made their pages as hard as possible to access with automated tools. People move to agents, if your site is "invisible" to agentic users (no API, no MCP) people won't find it. Companies start opening up APIs - which lets non-agent users like us create tooling on top of it _without_ agents.

Do you have even an example of this (one should ask for measurable data openness) or are you just making stuff up? Everything around has/is becoming more closed and I have one example: Reddit. It is not impossible to read without an account (account-walled).

I have a friend who works in B2B eCommerce specifically with some projects in D2C and they're saying that SEO is mostly a dead end now. It's all about Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) or Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

So if someone is looking for a 18V cordless drill for drilling into concrete, they'll most likely ask an agent. If your site has bad AEO/GEO, the product pages are either impossible to read by an agent or the data is badly formatted -> the agent won't recommend your product, resulting in a lost sale.

Like SEO gave us OpenGraph and similar common tools to provide data in a machine readable form, AEO/GEO will force data to be readable by agents.

Some sites like Consumer Reports block all crawlers, so we'll see how that goes for them.

Re: Grok Bot

#303

everyone is shipping their in house solutions and they all seem...kinda the same.

It's funny because it can also just be recreated yourself extremely easily.

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by...

Re: Grok Bot

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time. What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When fiv…

Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

> If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

I'm sure mainframe time-share providers in the '60s and '70s were salivating at the possibility of computers mediating most business tasks, too, completely unaware of the microcomputer revolution that was about to happen.

Re: Grok Bot

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else.…

> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email , previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.

The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.

On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.

Re: Grok Bot

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is no one's end goal. It's just the market being irrational longer than sane people can stay solvent.

It's greed at the top pushing the market into insanity. "AI" vendors are dangling the carrot of "eliminate manpower" in front of the manpower-owning class and they are throwing everything they have at it. The wealth that's been thrown into this hole could have payed for a couple million work-years of developers.

Insanity in the market is drawing in profit-seekers. "Greed at the top pushing the market into insanity" isn't really something that can happen: greedy folks are adept at leveraging incentive structures that have already emerged, but very bad at trying to purposefully shift macro-level incentives at a grand scale (which is something that humans in general are quite bad at).

Re: Grok Bot

#307

My initial impression is strong: Agent-to-Agent comms are clearly a first-class citizen of this tech. There's a cohesion that's palpable. Maybe it just fits my workflow better than other tools. I have some routines set up for tomorrow morning that will tell me if the juice is worth the squeeze. 48% weekly usage left after 3 hours of experimenting, tough.

What plan are you on? Does the bot have its own usage, or does it count against cursor/grok code usage?

I purchased Ultra just to test. The cursor dashboard doesn't show I have any usage, but the app says 48%

Re: Grok Bot

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been in sales? If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars). If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that. The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious. Sending out RF…

The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say. A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed. Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.

Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents.

On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.

Re: Grok Bot

#309
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email , previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.

The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quote…

> The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't.

Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware.

Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.

Re: Grok Bot

#310
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

> If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to. I'm sure mainframe time-share providers in the '60s and '70s were salivating at the possibility of computers mediating most business tasks, too, completely unaware of the microcomputer revolution that was about to happen.

Very much this - we are firmly at the centralised stage - when I have truly local AI running on my devices, my cost will be the energy they use - if I use open source models. I follow a guy on instagram who is doing this today, with old mobile phones and Raspberry Pi - for now I'll stick to my free Perplexity account, but looking forward to being self-sufficient one day.
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