41–50 of 198 posts
The problem is scams which is a solvable problem. Eliminate the scams and AI can’t be scammed. It’s been done. See Singapore. Basically if you’re a scammer and you’re caught, death penalty or public whipping. That eliminates scammers real quick.
https://www.police.gov.sg/-/media/Spf/Media-Room/Statistics/...
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars" But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff. How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list…
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars" But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff. How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list…
For the rest of us, the idea of a robot spending money on our behalf is kinda terrifying.
I appreciate that the article correctly points out the core design flaw here of LLMs is the non-distinction between content and commands in prompts. It’s unclear to me if it’s possible to significantly rethink the models to split those, but it seems that that is a minimal requirement to address the issue holistically.
The flaw isn't just in the design, it's in the requirements. People want an AI that reads text they didn't read and does the things the text says need to be done, because they don't want to do those things themselves. And they don't want to have to manually approve every little action the AI takes, because that would be too slow. So we get the equivalent of clicking "OK" on every dialog that pops up without reading i…
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars" But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff. How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list…
It’s what wealthy people use human assistants for. If AI could do it as reliably, people would use that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s what wealthy people use human assistants for. If AI could do it as reliably, people would use that.
It's not looking good so far. When OpenAI introduced product searches back in April I tried running one of their own example queries from the announcement post, and it obliviously cited "reviews" and "recommendations" from LLM-generated affiliate link farms. I just tried it again and it still falls into the same trap.
And they have a track record of good success at fooling full-on human intelligences too, which does not bode well for creating AIs with current technologies that can win against such swarm evolution.
I make no strong claims about what future AI architectures may be able to do in this domain, or whether we'll ever create AIs that can defeat the scamming ecosystem in toto (even when the scamming ecosystem has full access to the very same AIs, which makes for a rather hard problem). I'm just saying that LLMs don't strike me as being able to deal with this without some sort of upgrade that will make them not described by "LLM" anymore but as some fundamentally new architecture.
(You can of course adjoin them to existing mechanisms like blocklists for sites, but a careful reading of the article will reveal that the authors were already accounting for that.)
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars" But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff. How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list…
Agent, I need some vitamin D, can you find me the best deal for some rated in the top 5? Agent deployed. Ok we found a bottle with a 30 day supply of Nature’s Own from a well respected merchant. It can be here in 2 days and it is $12. Should I buy? Yes. Or you could add some other parameters and tell it to buy now if under $15. Agent, I need a regular order for my groceries, but I also need to make a pumpkin pie so c…
This should hit the headlines. I was always of the opinion that AI of all kinds is not a threat unless someone decides to connect it to an actuator so that it has direct and uncontrolled effect on the external world. And now it's happening en masse with agents, MCPs etc. I don't even mention things we don't know about (military and other classified projects).
Yea I’ve been surprised about the risk conversations because they cannot do anything if you run them in a sandbox. But it seems like for many the assumed part was we’d hook LLMs into everything asap. It’s absolutely mind boggling.
The "many" are lazy, and agents require relatively low effort to implement for a big payoff, so naturally the many will flock to that.
I don't understand why we would ever want an agent to buy stuff for us. I understand, for example, search with intent to buy "I want to decorate a room. Find me a drawer, a table and four chairs that can fit in this space in matching colours for less than X dollars" But I want to do the final step to buy. In fact, I want to do the final SELECTION of stuff. How is agent buying groceries superior to have a grocery list…
Why not? Offload the entire task, not just one half of it. It's why many well-off people have accountants, assistants, or servants. And no one says "you know, I'm glad you prepared my taxes, but let me file the paperwork myself".
I think what you're saying isn't that you like going through checkout flows, just that you don't trust the computer to do it. But the approach the AI industry is "build it today and hope the underlying tech improves soon". It's not always wrong. But "be dependable enough to trust it with money" appears to be a harder problem than "generate images of people with the right number of fingers".
No doubt that some customers are going to get burned. But I have no doubt that down the line, most people will be using their phones as AI shoppers.