It's not a case of wanting to it's a case of going to ChatGPT first instead of going to Google or the iOS App Store. Currently GPT gets you better answers than Google so people are gonna be going there first.
That says a lot more about what Google has become, than GPT.
That was my intention, they've completely dropped the ball lately and I don't know if its incompetence or just they through there would never be another option so felt the need to optimize for another metric than search success.
The problem is not the limitations of the capabilities per se but their discoverability ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discoverability ). The user doesn't know what the capabilities are, as they are added and -- infuriatingly -- removed. Google Assistant is a perfect example of this. Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
Voice interfaces actually remind me a lot of command-line interfaces: If you know the a working "rune" on the tip of your tongue (e.g., "Set a timer for 10 mintues", "Play ") it's great. But as you say, it's not always that easy to figure out new "runes". LLMs should be somewhat better for that, though.
The LLM is phenomenal at figuring out what you want, but it still has to map it to the schema of the tool. So while the job of figuring out the working “rune” is offloaded from you to the LLM, it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of the available “runes” likely being brittle and insufficient for any given task even when the LLM knows exactly what you want to do.
It's interesting to see how chatgpt is becoming more and more of a starting point of the web exploration, at which they're like, why even bother searching at this point, we'll just have default workflows for maps, buy (integration of stripe already marks it), booking airlines etc, which covers so much basic stuff people would do anyways. The biggest bottleneck for this for the past two years imo wasn't the models, bu…
I’m not sure how many people there are like me outside of this website but there’s not a single bone in my body that wants to use AI for these things. Buying plane tickets for example. It’s not even that I don’t trust the AI or that I’m afraid it might make a mistake. I just inherently want to feel like I’m in control of these processes. It’s the same reason I’m more afraid of flying than driving despite flying being…
you don't have to go so far as it buying the tickets for you if you don't trust it enough to do that. I built a deep research agent and one of the tasks that i found it very useful for was taking complex requirements and building a report for me to review and make decisions based off of. I live in one city, my travel partner lives in another, and we each want flights to get to a city around the same time, options for airbnbs, and travel activities. I may not trust ai to do this without human intervention but i certainly trust it to assemble this information for me with options and i can make decisions based on that
It's interesting to see how chatgpt is becoming more and more of a starting point of the web exploration, at which they're like, why even bother searching at this point, we'll just have default workflows for maps, buy (integration of stripe already marks it), booking airlines etc, which covers so much basic stuff people would do anyways. The biggest bottleneck for this for the past two years imo wasn't the models, bu…
I’m not sure how many people there are like me outside of this website but there’s not a single bone in my body that wants to use AI for these things. Buying plane tickets for example. It’s not even that I don’t trust the AI or that I’m afraid it might make a mistake. I just inherently want to feel like I’m in control of these processes. It’s the same reason I’m more afraid of flying than driving despite flying being…
In India, it is pretty common to call a travel agent and book tickets, in fact it is the preferred method for those who can afford it. It is super convenient, everything including the transfer of funds is taken care of by the agent.
This experience is 10x better than online alternatives. AI agents can replicate this at marginal cost.
ok but not sure why i need to build an mcp for my product if llms can already call my existing apis ?
If you are not sure, you don't need it. If you get to understand the usefulness of MCP, then you might find a use for it.
well i was responding to person who was asking me "what a better way over mcp" to interact with your product. looks like you inserted yourself with your usual one line non sequiturs. BOT.
Yeah... no. I'm going to pass. The premise is bad from any angle. In the case of businesses, why "create" another "Amazon" and compete with other brands when the focus should be on getting customers through my sales funnel? For developers is much worse since they are going to copy Amazon's model with brands that found a niche: Amazon Basics. In this case, it'll be OpenAI "core" (or something like that), where you do…
Companies like OpenTable that make money on the backend for connecting you with the restaurant will happily partner with OpenAI on this.
There are plenty of brokers that will add immense value to ChatGPT for free and if users go there looking for something, it's only a matter of time.
Right now, I only like using the chat interface to answer questions I can't quite form into searches, but I also don't go directly to a chat bot to book dinner reservations. However, if I'm using the service to riff on ideas for a romantic thing to do with my partner, and it somehow leads me to resturant reservations, I do think I would engage with it and come back to ChatGPT in the future for novel interactions like that.
They all pay the price of google (micro-brainwashing by ads to buy things they don't need). I think the average person will happily pay the same price to OpenAI (being micro-brainwashed by the AI to buy things they don't need, i.e. ads). I feel confident OpenAI will be able to charge even more for ads than Google since OpenAI will be able to influence people even more strongly, and hide the ads even better.
But OpenAI's costs are exponentially higher than Google's (even taking into account the various Google freebies they don't charge for).
Playlists aren't interactive though. I can't say "like this but with less guitar". Also, following the Beatport top 100 tech house playlist, and hearing how many tracks aren't actually tech house makes me wonder about who makes that particular playlist.
I don't know, I don't buy that this is a use case that matters enough to sway anyone. That's how I feel about a lot of AI stuff. Like... It's neat. It's a fun novelty. It makes a good party trick. It's the software equivalent of a knick knack. Like 90% of the pixel AI features. There's some good ones in there, sure, but most of them you play around with for a day and then forget exist.
Okay so you're at the party, and you do a cool party trick, and then that cute stranger you've been eyeing all night finally comes over to talk to you. Why's it need to be more than that?
In an alarm, there is only one parameter to set. In more complex tasks, chat is a bad ui because it does not scale well and it does not offer good ways to arrange information. Eg if I want to buy something and I have a bunch of constraints, I would rather use a search-based UI where i can fast tweak these constraints and decide. Chathpt being smart or not here is irrelevant, it would just be bad ui for the task.
You're thinking in wrong categories. Suppose you want to buy a table. You could say "I'm looking for a €400 100x200cm table, black" and these are your search criteria. But that's not what you actually want. What you actually want is a table that fits your use case and looks nice and doesn't cost much, and "€400 100x200cm table, black" is a discrete approximation of your initial fuzzy search. A chatbot could talk to y…
Even when going to a shop, I prefer to look into the options myself first. Explaining a salesperson what I need can take much more time, and then I am never sure if they just try to upsell, if I can explain my use case well etc. The only case where I opt for a salesperson first is when I cannot translate my use case to specification due to high degree of technical or other knowledge needed. I can imagine eg somebody who knows nothing about computers ask "I want a laptop, with good battery, I would use it for this and that", the same way they would ask a salesperson or a technical friend. But I cannot imagine using such an LLM to look for a table where I need it to fit measurements etc, or anything that is not inaccessible in terms of product knowledge. If I know the specifications, opting for an AI chatbot is inefficient. If not, it could help.