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101 points eleye | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Nextgrid ◴[] No.45787447[source]
What problem is this trying to solve exactly?

If a computer (or “agent” in modern terms) wants to order you a pizza it can technically already do so.

The reason computers currently can’t order us pizza or book us flights isn’t because of a technical limitation, it’s because the pizza place doesn’t want to just sell you a pizza and the airline doesn’t want to just sell you a flight. Instead they have an entire payroll of people whose salaries are derived from wasting human time, more commonly know as “engagement”. In fact those people will get paid regardless if you actually buy anything, so their incentive is often to waste more of your time even if it means trading off an actual purchase.

The “malicious” uses of AI that this very article refers to are mostly just that - computers/AI agents acting on behalf of humans to sidestep the “wasting human time” issue. The fact that agents may issue more requests than a human user is because information is intentionally not being presented to them in a concise, structured manner. If Dominos or Pizza Hut wanted to sell just pizzas tomorrow they can trivially publish an OpenAPI spec for agents to consume, or even collaborate on an HPOP protocol (Hypertext Pizza Ordering Protocol) to which HPOP clients can connect (no LLMs needed even). But they don’t, because wasting human time is the whole point.

So why would any of these companies suddenly opt into this system? Companies that are after actual money and don’t profit from wasting human time are already ready and don’t have to do anything (if an AI agent is already throwing Bitcoin or valid credit card details at you to buy your pizzas, you are fine), and those that do have zero incentive to opt in since they’d be trading off “engagement” for old-school, boring money (who needs that nowadays right?).

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1. afiori ◴[] No.45788647[source]
You can see it another way: everyone wants to be the one that controls access to services; it is what search and news aggregators have in common.

Even if pizza hut wanted people to order pizza the most efficiently with no time wasted it would still want it to happen on their own platforms.

Because if people went to all-pizzas.com for their pizza need then each restaurant and chain would depend on them not to screw them up

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2. DANmode ◴[] No.45792253[source]
What they want isn’t always what they get.

People were searching AOL keywords for things, and will again.

Only now: by asking OpenAI, Anthropic, or a competitor’s agent.

3. otterley ◴[] No.45792983[source]
> Because if people went to all-pizzas.com for their pizza need then each restaurant and chain would depend on them not to screw them up

This is precisely what makes food delivery ordering services (GrubHub, UberEats, Deliveroo, etc.) so challenging to operate and maintain. Practically every restaurant accepts orders in a different way, and maintaining custom mechanisms for each one is costly. Restaurant front-of-house technology companies like Toast are helping make them operate alike, but adoption is slow and there are many, many restaurants to tackle.