> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so

In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".

Things that are not doing the thing. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

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 as additions to products, but rather subsume products, and this makes them an existential threat to the software industry. Not to software or computing, just to all the software vendors, whose job is to slice off pieces of computational universe, put them in boxes to prevent interoperability, and give each a name so it's a "product" that can be sold or rented).

> Perplexity also attempted this, got sued by Amazon and it appears semi-abandoned.

Any details on that? I feel the answer is more likely there than in "friction".

Hardly any purchase of consequence is so sensitive to friction that the difference between Google Search and an LLM response matters (especially that in reality, we're talking 20+ manual searches per one LLM response). I.e. I'm not going to use LLMs advise on some random 0-100$ purchase anyway, and losing #$ on a ##$ purchase due to suboptimal choice is not that big of a deal - but I absolutely am going to consult it (and have it compile tables and verify sources) on a $500+ purchase and for those I can afford spending few more minutes on research (or rather few hours less, compared of doing it the usual way).

More targeted ads.

Today, ads are based on user information you can reasonably collect from the users historical actions on your website, and then whatever search term they enter.

But soon, ads can be based on your current chat context + (derived interests of yours from your entire chat history across all chats. Shhhh.) passed in full to the e-commerce website that will use it to choose ads, generates creatives on the fly, all that crap, hyper-specific to you.

I'm so excited. Aren't you?

Now, as a side effect, searching through these can become better experience wise as well. They can use all that context and genuinely surface fewer, better results. But that's not the motivation of the e-commerce player anyways. If the ads work they'll be happy.

Ssshhh there’s an “VP of AI Transformation” getting paid $600,000 to do this plus the budget. They need their “AI transformation journey” to show to the board.

I think you're misinterpreting what his comment meant. I read it as meaning that e-commerce has been optimised repeatedly over the 30 years, from a basic start (which as you pointed out was haphazard) to the point where it is now optimised to extract every possible cent from the user, whether by encouraging them to buy with one click (the Amazon one-click patent must be around 20 years old now), time-limited promo spot pricing, sending you e-mails about what you had in the basket if you don't complete a sale, etc...

Right now, by comparison, it sounds like AI based shopping is still in the very early stages. Maybe further along than the early e-commerce, but still with a long way to go in its evolution. That'll probably happen quicker than with e-commerce, because a lot of the knowledge about what does or doesn't work has already been learned, but it sounds like it's still a long way behind. Caveat - I've never used it myself, so I don't know how far it is along that path, I'm just basing that from the article.

And quickly after that, we were meassuring traffic data with simple "how-many-requests-were-done" (including images) :-D

30 years ago is 1996. Amazon had been around for 2 years (they were incorporated in 1994).

I remember having to describe a standard model to predict online shopping behaviors for my ML class exam in university. That was close to 10 years ago now.

Also remember a teacher telling us about that story of a company finding a woman was pregnant from her shopping behavior and pushing relevant recommendation. Prompting people around her like her dad or something to find out she was pregnant

So, you're proposing we've been optimizing E-Commerce since...2021? Amazon was founded in 1994. It was not the first site selling things online (but it's the most recognizable one). E-Commerce has been getting attention for a *very* long time [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_e-commerce

This is a very confusing comment to me. How were people buying books from Amazon in the 90s if it wasn't e-commerce?