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101 points eleye | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.413s | 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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matsemann ◴[] No.45788679[source]
What are you on about? I genuinely don't understand your point. Of course they make money by selling pizzas, not something else. And they've figured the way to maximize that is by having a brand and a presence and own the customer relationship, thus people buy from then.

If they end up as just a pizza-api they have no moat and are trivially replaced by another api and bakery, and will make less money.

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1. rixed ◴[] No.45788974[source]
The original comment may be phrased clumsily. I believe the idea was that they do not want to make money by competing on a pizza market. That's the contradiction as old as the modern economy that it both relies on free market in principle, yet evolves naturally toward monopolies/walled gardens/fiefdoms.

Another contradiction at play here is that of inovation vs standardisation. Indeed, you could argue that dominoes' website is also a place where thay can inovate (bring your own recipes! delivery by drone! pay with tokens! wtv!) whereas a pizza protocol would slow down or prevent some inovation. And that LLMs are used to circumvent and therefore standardize the process of ordering a pizza (like you had user maintained APIs to query various incompatible banq websites; these days they probably use LLMs as well).