alt Hacker News> Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting. – Citrini Research
Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.
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Amazon has brand value because both buyers and sellers trust it, aside from the shipping speed. An LLM can't evaluate trust for you, and it especially won't win in adverserial games like price haggling.
How long until the AI provider takes a 15%-20% cut? "Affiliate fees"...
Amazon has giant warehouses all over the country to deliver things to people quickly, sometimes within a couple of hours. What is an LLM going to do about that?
You disregard the fact that the sellers will have opposing LLMs constantly adding more signals that they're legitimate.
The sellers and the marketplaces can spend more time on their LLMs because it's their livelihood. It's the same asymmetry with different tooling.
"We are going to put online shopping on the blockchain and eliminate gatekeepers and fraud"
I don’t buy it.
First, I think there is value in the “rent seeking” Amazon marketplace because how else would the models “go straight to the seller”, another centralized search engine? Why not just use the Amazon one then?
Second, one of LLMs big weaknesses is judgement on what to trust. I would not trust the judgment of an LLM to determine “the seller is legit”… unless we outsource trust verification to a third party marketplace (who will want a cut).
Finally, OpenAI has been aggressively pushing for this so they can take a cut of the transaction. So it’ll just be another middle man.