OpenAI gets into shopping
OpenAI and Perplexity, armed with significant AI capabilities, have targeted the shopping domain. And have run into many problems around data access and semantics.
This raises three thoughts:
- First, companies which are bullish about AI “changing everything”, are stumbling in maybe the most traditional, mundane domain: shopping. This doesn’t inspire confidence in their technology.
- Second, companies which speak of ushering in the singularity in just a few months, are dedicating person-years of engineering to a conventional market. This doesn’t indicate they trust their own predictions.
- Third, the poster child of AI, OpenAI, is wading into crowded markets (shopping, hardware) with predictable volumes, dealing with competitors with decades of experience. This doesn’t support the valuation these companies currently have.
As I argued a decade ago: AI is inevitable, but it will eventually be boring.
AI will enable millions of exciting things, including improvements in shopping. We are currently seeing a mix of inflated expectations and irrational decisions. The problems AI is encountering —in shopping, with self-driving cars, in other domains— prove these powerful technologies are limited, not panaceas.
The current challenge isn't just a technical one; it's a profound lack of understanding. No one —from the person filing forms in an office to the CIO, from individual developers to the highly-paid expert researchers at OpenAI— truly grasps the full capabilities and limitations of these technologies.
That these companies are going for such traditional domains shows that their planning is returning to the normal world, no matter what their narrative otherwise is. They are thinking of market shares and products and profits, just like everyone else. These can be very profitable, assuming a traditional understanding of profitability. They will still disrupt many jobs and rewire parts of the economy. But in the end, it’s just a very powerful new technology.
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