381–390 of 397 posts
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But OpenAI's costs are exponentially higher than Google's (even taking into account the various Google freebies they don't charge for).
Google wasn’t always profitable.
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…
If (when) companies want their things to be present in ChatGPT replies, they need to provide an AI-compatible way to get it. Just shoving a full-ass web page at it is inefficient and error-prone.
They have to either build a version of their site that's AI-accessible or provide an API (or MCP) for it to access the data.
Now that the API is built and the cost is paid, we can use it for non-AI uses.
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I don’t see why you wouldn’t book a flight using an AI assistant. No one’s saying it should do it completely unsupervised (maybe that’ll come much later), but having something that can research the best routes based on my criteria and show me several options — with a single click to purchase the one I find most convenient — is something I’d love. It could even work against the dynamic pricing algorithms airlines use…
I would try using AI to book flights - then double check if I can't get a better offer. Do this a couple of times and when I see AI is as good or even better at getting me flights, then sure, why not use it.
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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.
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…
The main showstopper here is trust. I just can't let anything AI make decisions that have consequences, like spending money, buying anything, planning vacations, flights etc. It's so bad now (I've just tried) that I'm not sure if it will ever gain my trust.
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> Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night I built this 18 months ago at an OTA platform. We parse the query and identify which terms are locations, which are hotel features, which are room amenities etc. Then we apply those filters (we have thousands of attributes that can be filtered on, but cannot display all of them in the UI) and display the…
You want it in a chat with other tools and intelligence so that you can give softer preferences and for it to judge reviews and the like. Perhaps even look at the room layout and photos to see if it is something you would like. There are good reasons to surround the tool you describe with AI.
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> Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night I built this 18 months ago at an OTA platform. We parse the query and identify which terms are locations, which are hotel features, which are room amenities etc. Then we apply those filters (we have thousands of attributes that can be filtered on, but cannot display all of them in the UI) and display the…
We built something like this too (in a different field), but it's actually quit hard to deal with all the edge cases that people might want to search for: e.g. if the user asks "Find hotels in Capetown [...] that have availability for this christmas or new year": if your backend, or the response format that you're forcing the LLM to give, doesn't have the ability to do an OR on the date range, you can't give results…
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I would argue a website made to buy you tickets (skyscanner f.e.) is always gonna be a better interface than chat. Right now I cant imagine an AI (esp. chat) being more convenient for me than skyscanner or Google Hotels, but maybe I’m missing the imagination.
Flexibility is the advantage. In a chat interface, you can type literally whatever you want and ChatGPT will do its best to serve you. In a website like Skyscanner, you are inherently limited by their UI design. If all you want is the cheapest flight on a specific day, Skyscanner is really great. But what if you need to book a bus at the other end of your flight? Skyscanner is not going to help you with that, but Cha…
I think if you really exactly know what you want the input in AI might be faster "book me on the flight tomorrow at 1pm from x to y on airline xyz -y" This I could imagine being faster, but it would still require verification by me to actually pay. I wonder if AI is faster in doing that given the added latency compared to me visiting airline xyz and doing the search manually (even perceive loading time taking in consideration) as it will be perceived less time if you are active.
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I would argue a website made to buy you tickets (skyscanner f.e.) is always gonna be a better interface than chat. Right now I cant imagine an AI (esp. chat) being more convenient for me than skyscanner or Google Hotels, but maybe I’m missing the imagination.
Here's somewhat of a counter example. At work our llm project can schedule you time off. Workday already has a dedicated UI for this, so text interface can't be better right? Well it's a very popular feature, people use it all the time. In my opinion it's not better than a dedicated UI, but for some people it's good enough and more convenient (our site loads much faster than workday, they are likely already using it…
I see my mistake now. I evaluate based on how it could be useful for me. As a heavy computer user, familiar with shortcuts and user interfaces, interacting with UX works very good.
But for a lot of users text will be more natural and easier. I might be able to get the flight I want easiest with Skyscanner, but other users might not be and will come to a better result with texts.
It’s the same as I prefer documentations over Youtube tutorials, but it’s different on different stages.
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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?
This isn't me making a cute little website in my free time. This is thousands of developers, super computers out the wazoo, and a huge chunk of the western economy.
Like, a snowglobe is cute. They don't do much, but they're cute. I'd buy one for ten dollars.
I would not buy a snowglobe for 10 million dollars.