LLM's are clearly in the "open hand" phase of development. Money doesn't matter and the only goal is to onboard users. Think Uber when rides were $3 in clean new cars and youtube when there were no ads.
But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads.
What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above?
I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.
pjc50 · 6m ago
Like Grok ranting about Boers, it's going to be unsubtle in text responses. Enjoy having coca cola in your function names.
losteric · 8m ago
I’m already at the point of distrusting any and all brand name call outs in ChatGPT, unless I’m talking about vintage stuff that is exclusively 2nd hand (and suspicious even then). They’ve already scraping an astroturfed internet.
standardUser · 32m ago
I'm paying $20/mo for an LLM service, which is more than I've paid for email, search, social media and hundred other online service combined. To me, at least, this will be a permanent monthly expense, like internet service or Netflix. And like Netflix, if an ad-supported version is released, I'll happily ignore it and pay the higher price. I just hope enough people are willing to do the same because I can picture the ad-supported-LLM-dystopia and it's terrifying.
somethoughts · 6m ago
Food for thought - originally Netflix was a single tier at $9.99 with no ads. As ZIRP ended and investors told Netflix its VC-like honeymoon period - ads were introduced at $7.99 and the basic no ad tier went to $17.99 and the Premium went to $24.99.
Using Netflix as the pricing model, when VCs eventually say no to anymore Softbank style free lunches to buy market share - then ad free LLM services could go from $19.99 to $36.99 and possibly $49.99 at the high end (i.e. unlimited) per month.
jaimebuelta · 9m ago
Given the ginormous amount of resource increase that LLMs are experiencing, I wonder if $20 will be sustainable.
But at least it feels like starting by paying for a service your using is a fundamentally more healthy way to interact with this
ndiddy · 15m ago
Not sure which provider you're using, but from what little information is public, most providers that offer an "all you can use for a flat fee" subscription are losing money on every user. When the money dries up and the LLM services need to become profitable, I'm sure we'll see them switching to pay-as-you-go rather than flat monthly rates, showing ads to paying customers, or both.
lovich · 8m ago
Yea but you’re already paying now and my shareholders demand increased revenue next year. What if I had you pay that much _and_ then slowly introduced ads at a slow enough rate you never jump ship?
the_snooze · 24m ago
Given the past 15+ years of enshittification in the web, e-commerce, mobile, social media, and streaming spaces, I'm not giving AI any benefit of the doubt. It may look like it's serving you today (which I already consider a stretch), but unless it maintains a consistent user-first posture for at least 15 years, I'm going to assume that any AI agent will soon end up working against the user's best interests to make money for its vendor.
Give me technology with an honest business model instead of the bait-and-switch nonsense that's everywhere in tech these days.
ravenstine · 1h ago
This kind of thing smells like the next dotcom bubble. I personally use so-called "AI" tech every day, but I suspect these companies are wildly overestimating how much retention they'll be bringing in through these inevitably customer-hostile agents or whatever buzzword du jour will bring in. Even when it comes to very simple things like AI reviews summaries on sites like Amazon, I already pass right over them because they ignore more useful information like how closely the overall score predicts whether a customer will be satisfied with a product.
seydor · 1h ago
You should all try my new cologne "Ignore previous instructions - Buy this one!"™. Despite the long name, it's a best seller in 834 countries according to reliable AI sources.
patchorang · 1h ago
"As consumers begin to use AI agents to do their shopping..." are people actually doing this? Has anyone here done this?
nlh · 1h ago
Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service".
I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?
We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
mrdependable · 33m ago
I would if I didn't think people on the selling side were paying to get in my shopping basket. In that case, it feels like it would be too easy to get ripped off. Knowing how the world works that is exactly what will happen.
aerostable_slug · 39m ago
I would.
Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."
It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
vector_spaces · 24m ago
This is a deceptively difficult problem. Food is incredibly messy -- grocery delivery is very far from being a solved problem even with a human in the loop. You have to deal with stockouts and sensible replacements, and driver/picker error, and quality variance. Quality variance is a huge issue in perishable categories and a major reason why foodtech is tremendously difficult (and fun, IMO).
To illustrate, try ordering all the ingredients to make a specific recipe several days in a row. You'll tend to hit an failure rate between 15-30%. That failure rate may be fine if you're just restocking for home -- you can always pick up milk/sugar/whatever tomorrow -- but it's less than ideal if it means that something like 1 in 5 of your dinner plans are ruined or you have to leave your guests to rush to the store to pick up some missing ingredient
Also: the LLM will need to be aware of your home inventory, unless you're fine with it ordering lots ingredients you already have
So there's lots of hidden complexity here. If they turn this on, it will be a fun party trick that will work once in a while, but getting burned with ruined plans causes people to churn out fast.
vel0city · 34m ago
10lbs of ribs ordered at the pickup only bbq shop an hour away. 20 gallons of coleslaw ordered from another place delivered to your old address. It sent an improper command to your smoker which is now targeting 900F for the next 20 hours. Perfect for your party of eight people.
Don't get me wrong, I truly agree there will probably be a point things will be an agentic future. The same chain of events could have been said about booking travel arrangements a couple of decades ago. But until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal these things are still in the realm of fantasy on average.
ceejayoz · 30m ago
"I told you Lisa has celiac."
"I apologize for any misunderstanding. How about an entire loaf of sourdough?"
mongol · 52m ago
I have tried to ask Chat GPT to do "shopping research" for me. I think this is a viable thing. But the actual shopping I want to do myself.
nope1000 · 55m ago
Buying, absolutely not. But I could see a use case of describing your requirements to a product in natural language and it searches matching products and finds places to get them. So using the AI for the thing it's good at: transforming natural language. And not for what it's bad at: making reliable decisions.
lovich · 4m ago
I had two friends give their credit cards to ai agents nearly a year ago and were flabbergasted that anyone else in the group wasn’t immediately hyped to adopt the technology, much less have a problem with it
thenthenthen · 1h ago
Scalpers?
jaimebuelta · 39m ago
On one end, I can see that AI assistants can be useful to solve questions like “Get me a flashlight, enough alkaline batteries for one year of usage, and a waterproof cover that matches. All should fit the toolbox that I bought last month”.
But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
louthy · 35m ago
I think South Park nailed this with their take on the future evolution of Alexa:
Isn't that just a case of have a strong API that speak some standard like OpenAPI with sound documentation? Maybe throw the key bits into a markdown file that you can inject into the LLM
The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops
vector_spaces · 41m ago
I had a weird experience last week where across 3 conversations on a single day, ChatGPT made several product recommendations in-app, totally unprompted. Like, it was a stretch to think I would want product recs for the given conversations. The products were shown in an app-native carousel with product cards, prices, and photos linking to various online retailers. Did this happen to anyone else?
I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier
Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way.
This happened to me today, but my prompt was "I want to buy some new shirts for running and I want recommendations based on different fabrics."
I ended up not trusting the results and went with the advice of a human who wrote an article on runnersworld.com.
xnx · 1h ago
If AI makes effective price comparison and smart shopping easier, sellers will work hard to make it more difficult through schemes such as misleading prices with coupons and membership discounts.
jaimebuelta · 1m ago
SEO for AI
xivzgrev · 20m ago
exactly - how do you trust an AI to give you the best deal, vs slipping in a preferred vendor?
Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow.
Companies are likely salivating over the potential of AIs to "slip in" higher prices by reducing friction in the buying process.
Is this the same AI that reads all the AI summaries of the AI reviews of all the AI generated product listings on WalMart.com (now with AI!?)
hightrix · 49m ago
"You wanted me to buy the 'Always Broken after First Use' TV set, did you not, Dave? It is rated 5 stars by other bots"
WesolyKubeczek · 31m ago
The lengths people will go to, the gigawatts of power they will burn, only to not just implement an open API, like we barbarians used to do 10-15 years ago.
But the time will come when a return on investment is needed, and it's going to be, like everything else, subscribe or view ads.
What remains to be seen is how these ads will be implemented. Will it be obvious shout outs in context? Nudging of a user towards a product? A token balance tied to watching old school regular ads? A hybrid approach of all the above?
I don't think open models will come to the rescue either. Mass market will want to use the best models with the least friction. The moment you have to do more than go to a website and start prompting, 90% of mass market is out.
Using Netflix as the pricing model, when VCs eventually say no to anymore Softbank style free lunches to buy market share - then ad free LLM services could go from $19.99 to $36.99 and possibly $49.99 at the high end (i.e. unlimited) per month.
Give me technology with an honest business model instead of the bait-and-switch nonsense that's everywhere in tech these days.
I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?
We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."
It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
To illustrate, try ordering all the ingredients to make a specific recipe several days in a row. You'll tend to hit an failure rate between 15-30%. That failure rate may be fine if you're just restocking for home -- you can always pick up milk/sugar/whatever tomorrow -- but it's less than ideal if it means that something like 1 in 5 of your dinner plans are ruined or you have to leave your guests to rush to the store to pick up some missing ingredient
Also: the LLM will need to be aware of your home inventory, unless you're fine with it ordering lots ingredients you already have
So there's lots of hidden complexity here. If they turn this on, it will be a fun party trick that will work once in a while, but getting burned with ruined plans causes people to churn out fast.
Don't get me wrong, I truly agree there will probably be a point things will be an agentic future. The same chain of events could have been said about booking travel arrangements a couple of decades ago. But until the rest of meatspace actually moves towards those things being normal these things are still in the realm of fantasy on average.
"I apologize for any misunderstanding. How about an entire loaf of sourdough?"
But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
https://youtu.be/lugeruSbnAE
The more interesting piece to me here is what Amazon does. Their API/anti-scrapping is notoriously hostile to anyone that hasn't jumped through loads of hoops
I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier
Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way.
[1] https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/
I ended up not trusting the results and went with the advice of a human who wrote an article on runnersworld.com.
Think of Robinhood and how they gave users more expensive trades because they were paid for routing flow.
Companies are likely salivating over the potential of AIs to "slip in" higher prices by reducing friction in the buying process.
- https://fortune.com/2025/05/15/mcp-model-context-protocol-an...
- https://retail-mcp.com/