[com2kid]

ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.

> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,

That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.

That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.

[necovek]

> That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.

Indeed it is, but when you are p95 (at least for height, but not overweight), you'll soon learn that you do not have any other option: common sizes stop growing in length (at least noticeably) usually at XL or even L, so you are looking for specific fits (long, slim) and those are rarely stocked in stores. Sometimes I'll try a model from one brand and buy a different colour online.

But enter online shopping and 14-30 day return windows.

Still, for formal wear (shirts, jackets, suits), I simply stick with made-to-measure and custom tailoring.

[fbnlsr]

I bought a used laptop with the help of ChatGPT last month and was amazed. It helped me narrow the model that suited my needs based on my prompts. I needed to renew my old Thinkpad T480. It also helped me find an ad and negociate with the seller.

I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.

[jrflowers]

>That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail.

I feel like I see a brand new way of saying “something that people don’t really want” on a near daily basis nowadays

[com2kid]

It means Google will show you the top 5 brands for a product category and then give up. If you want something more specific you have to search through reddit threads. Or you can have chatgpt search through reddit threads for you.

[tyg13]

No, you don't understand. We're...

- mining the 95th percentile, leveraging the Pareto Principle

- optimizing and ubiquitizing under-optimized paradigms

- pioneering agentic solutions to aggressively expand product frontiers

- innovating high-risk strategies to serve underserved markets

- digging deep into the inner recesses of my being and extracting what's left of my soul through my nostrils

And so much more.

[fn-mote]

You and the parent are dismissing an actual customer who really used the “AI” successfully.

I don’t want to believe LLMs are the future of shopping either, but it’s wrong to dismiss actual successful users with hot air.

[matwood]

Yeah, people are letting their biases get in the way of seeing the reality.

[QuercusMax]

> ChatGPT has helped me find multiple niche products and vendors. It is really good at that. Products I fruitlessly tried to find for years, ChatGPT found right away.

isn't that what search engines were built for? we've just forgotten how to build a search engine that's not just an ad factory, so instead we're putting an ad factory into our new search engine?

[BHSPitMonkey]

ChatGPT and similar are, in some sense, a semantic web search engine combined with an operator that's able to jot down its findings, pivot to different lookups, and filter/combine outputs.

[marcus_holmes]

I use Kagi to search, and claude to help me find things. These are different tasks.

If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.

If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.

Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.

[necovek]

I wonder if LLMs will actually kill Youtube for those who are like you (and me)? I am curious to see if anything happens to earnings from Youtube over the next few years as people increasingly do not need to sit through whole videos.

[marcus_holmes]

I used YouTube extensively when getting into 3D printing a few years ago, though it drove me to distraction because of all the wasted time waiting for them to get to the point, even at 3x playback.

So yeah, I can see YouTube content creator revenue drying up around this. Though I also had ad-blockers and had perfected the art of skipping through product placements, so I doubt they were making much revenue from me anyway.

[kube-system]

It is what they are supposed to do but they are SEO’d so bad that they give you prominent brands rather or least common denominator type stuff.

If you have a list of specific criteria, search engines are impossibly bad at finding what you’re looking for, but top LLMs do it with ease.

ChatGPT and Claude have been amazing timesavers in my recent tech acquisitions at work, and I find I am able to find better solutions

[com2kid]

I needed some extra wide toe box shoes. Search results had been SEOed to hell so I could only find a handful of brands (that I'd already tried).

Chatgpt found me a lot more choices.

I wanted custom lifts for a shoe. Chatgpt found me a local store that did it, I'd been calling around for years asking to no avail.

Chatgpt is really damn good at niche stuff.