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Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

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Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#111

Post by leviathant »

theturtletalks wrote: post #96

People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things. So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’…

The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!

ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.

None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.

I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.

I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#112

Post by hmokiguess »

theturtletalks wrote: post #96

People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things. So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’…

Amazon is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#113

Post by cobbzilla »

matt123456789 wrote: post #71
aizk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!

To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md: > "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you s…

If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#114

Post by cush »

varispeed wrote: post #102
theturtletalks wrote: post #96

People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things. So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’…

Why it would be a threat? Unless Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want. In that case such practice surely should attract a look from regulators?

> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want

There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.

Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#115

Post by eigencoder »

hbcdbff wrote: post #65
eigencoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, what do you find different about it?

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.

When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.

An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.

I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#116

Post by artdigital »

hbcdbff wrote: post #65
eigencoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, what do you find different about it?

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns

It’s not using Codex to steer a headless browser

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#117

Post by kelvinjps10 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #96

People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things. So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’…

Isn't the value on same day delivery? Returns, warehouses, drivers, customer support all of that? How chatgpt is going to help with that?.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#118

Post by bshaughn »

theturtletalks wrote: post #93
bshaughn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend…

What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own?

If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.

I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.

After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#119

Post by moregrist »

gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.

The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.

In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.

Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#120

Post by embedding-shape »

bjt wrote: post #32
prometheus1992 wrote: post #18

Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?

They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent. The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.

I feel like it's the government that has to sue OpenAI for reckless endangerment of human life, or something similar. I don't believe the current models could "take over the world" even if humans tried to help them, but both OpenAI and Anthropic themselves talk publicly about how dangerous they believe these models to be. Then if that's so, they should be held responsible as if the models were that dangerous, but who's supposed to put that in motion? The only entity I can think of is the government.
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