alt Hacker NewsI'm going to poke at a downstream consequence here.
Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not).
So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with.
I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).
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At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests?
Because that's the clear next step here.
Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship?
Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.
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Wait, what? That makes no more sense than suing Walmart or Costco for having preferred suppliers. If you don’t trust Walmart’s buyers to buy groceries for you then you can shop somewhere else. Similarly here.
>I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).
That seems like a pretty big assumption, given that local models are only like a year behind frontier ones (or less).
When you consider that, along with the completely unsustainable business model of all the major 3rd parties, I think a far more realistic view of our AI future is that AI will largely be commodified: it won't run on a few specialized companies, it will run on your hardware, or on budget providers (think an "AWS of AI").
Frontier AI will almost certainly continue to exist, but will be focused on specific niches.