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by twelve40 1170 days ago
> Imagine Walmart launching a ChatGPT interfaced bot for shopping that customers take a liking to.

I can't imagine that, because it doesn't seem to fit the use case. Especially not to the point of bankruptcy of Amazon, maybe as a small novelty? Can you list some killer features that the chat would bring that would make the existing shopping experience irrelevant? Maybe not everything is a nail to the hammer?

1 comments

"I'm looking for X. Can you give me a few options with the benefits and drawbacks of each"

or

"I'm looking for X. Can you ask me a few questions and give me a choice of products based on that"

or

"I'm looking for a product that does X, Y, Z. Can you find such a product for me"

or

"Does this product do Y/is compatible with Z/is an appropriate give for person P"

I'm not saying this will happen. I'm saying it's a risk that Amazon should take seriously.

sure, this is basically a fancy version of the current FAQ's, customer's QnA and current recommendations (similar products, recommended products). Would it be just so much better in experience that it kills Amazon? i kind of doubt it. Also, we're currently talking model that was trained on pre-2021 data and here we have an inventory in the millions that changes daily, so the tech has to catch up, too.
Asking for your preferences to figure out your product choices or searching for a product for you based on your given requirements is a lot more than just FAQs and Q&As. You can even imagine a fancier version where you describe say what kind of setup you want and it gives you combinations that are nice.

Also this could aggregate information not just on the product page but across multiple pages which is time consuming to do by oneself.

As for 2021 cutoff -- ChatGPT can now browse the internet and if Walmart built a bot that interfaces with ChatGPT, I'm sure they would be feeding it the latest info

Everybody hates salespeople, and salespeople optimize for their own company's goals, just like an AI chatbot will have to.

There's no way you will want to interact more with Walmart's chatbot than necessary.

Why would you want an approximation of the average person on the internet to give you that advice?

When you're trying to answer that question now you'd presumably use heavy filters: wirecutter, trusted blogs, top reddit comments, etc. GPT won't.