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Original AI was sourced from university level text books, stack, wiki. Average iq around 140. The latest AI is trained on the average citizens social media output. Iq 90. That’s why AI seemed smart. The bar will not be raised again. We’re cooked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> impartial consistent system for shopping > for a lower price Catalog is impartial, chatbot is ads pretending as advice.
Catalog is impartial? Then why are ~40% of every search I do on Amazon a sponsored product? There is no pure "catalog" especially with cheap crap coming out every day from no-name Chinese labels. Am I the only one that think Amazon has gotten pretty awful in the last 5 years?
Why would anyone have an extra layer of friction too where things could go wrong, where handing over payment details in another chain.
Just let me buy my stuff in peace. Shopping is not the 'killer app' for GenAI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not that interested in getting good at it I think they're interested in getting good at it. They just don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so. They expect their many failures and short-comings to be shored up by continuous model training. But that, of course, means that in the meantime it will suck and nobody will use it.
I think they're operating beyond their current (human) capacity, trying to test out too many things at a time. But a dreamer in me entertains another idea: perhaps they're just holding back, because they realize that actually succeeding at this will instantly kill (or at least mortally wound) e-commerce as we know it. (This is a more narrow version of my belief that general AI tools like LLMs fundamentally don't fit…
That seems reasonable, its just yet to be seen if LLMs are a form of artificial intelligence in any meaningful sense of the word.
They're impressive ML for sure, but that is in fact different from AI despite how companies building them have tried to merge the terms together.
(Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. A chat interface is just fundamentally incompatible with this. The agent makes it too easy to ask questions and comparison shop.
> (Good) E-commerce has been ruthlessly optimised to get shoppers to products they'll actually buy and then remove all distractions from buying. The only e-commerce site that fits this standard is that old one for buying (IIRC) nuts and bolts or such, that pops up on HN every other year, and whose name sadly escapes me now. Everyone else is ruthlessly optimizing their experience to fuck shoppers over and get them to…
Sadly Sigma-Aldrich, the hyphenated retailer for chemistry, appears to have been covered in javascript sludge.
Is their issue that ChatGPT served their customers more than it served them?
Most people using AI chat are exploring ideas and solutions. They’re doodling, not shopping. Or in old timey parlance, they’re looky-loos or tire kickers at best.
Anyone who’s had to justify ad spend in e-commerce can tell you that some sources produce huge traffic with absolutely terrible conversion. Reddit and Pinterest pretty much blow for this reason, with limited exceptions. It’s also why TikTok and other influencer platforms really work.
Conversion requires a mental shift from discovery to demand.
Also, really hate summaries like this without the actual source so here are the main points from the actual source (WIRED https://archive.is/7DuEV):
1. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT performed poorly, with conversion about one-third of Walmart’s normal site.
2. The experience failed largely because it forced single-item purchases instead of letting users build a cart.
3. Walmart is shifting to embedding its own assistant, Sparky, inside ChatGPT and keeping checkout on its own system.
4. ChatGPT is still valuable because it’s driving significantly more new customer traffic than search.
5. Purchases that did work were mostly practical, problem-solving items like supplements and tools.
6. Fully automated “agentic shopping” is still unlikely in the near term because people want control over purchases.
7. OpenAI is moving away from in-chat checkout and focusing on helping users research while merchants handle transactions.
In short, AI is useful for discovery, but traditional e-commerce flows still outperform it at closing sales.