And it’s a service because AI
And the service costs a subscription fee
And the service quality drops once it saturates the market
And the service now contains ads
And the grocery stores can pay to promote their store when it is not the most affordable option
And now it’s not economically feasible to not use their service
This is disgusting, but true.
Upvoted
It is, sadly, all very poorly focused on the things that won’t benefit society as a whole, but once again, the ruling class. I really wish AI had not been developed with the intent to make white collar jobs obsolete. If only these same brilliant minds had been focused on robotics and processes that humans don’t want to participate in.
They are, look at modem factory or mine they’re full of robotics, now injuries are incredibly low and many of the most dangerous jobs are as safe as a well run office
We’re in a big transition as new technologies are developed, it’s going to take time but there are are some huge things coming soon - llms and cv are enabling fsctory toolarms to leave the factory so expect cooking arms, repair arms, construction arms, micro factories bringing manufacturing back to local markets… sure it sucks we don’t have it now but don’t hate the early stages of it just because it’s not finished yet.
What does creating pictures of astronaut kittens or videos of perpetual zooming have to do with any of that, let alone creating poems about robots and ninjas?
Best I can do is give you a list of the worst deals for you that will bring your money to the corporations who paid me the most with a nice helping of targeted ads for all eternity.
For that you need an expert system managing a data warehouse/Smart agent. That’s not Ai per se
For that you need companies that find value in cannibalizing sales of their more expensive products even if the quality is better.
Most stores in general rely on certain sales driving you in and you spending money on the more expensive items because your already there.
What? Man any standard order management system does that and to have one you don’t need to be any of those things.
Y’all nibbas need Jesus
So your saying you could go to amazon.com and they will instantly show you lower prices at perse Newegg and Best buy.
Also for a company, you order from one or multiple suppliers. There’s no system in place to cross shop, you just have to go to both suppliers and compare the prices yourself.
If they work together to that degree it would either encourage price fixing or cannibalize each other’s sales.
Sure why not, if they have a license for that.
Yeah the second thing that’s what OMS are supposed to be for, it’s B2B sales boy can handle b2c as well…so they do that as well, if you have the licenses and agreements for it
Last thing, nah, it doesn’t work like that. You wouldn’t have businesses working on the first place in that case, fixing prices leads to shortages, and forget about doing illegal activities with those systems, they are to be security compliant so if that happens is a lawsuit in waiting
Expert systems are totally AI
How?
AI is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is more than just language manipulation, and covers a very broad spectrum of things relating to “computers dynamically perceiving and adapting to their environment to further a goal”.
Having a body of information, using rules to infer new facts in light of that information, and using those rules and facts to respond to user inputs in a meaningful and helpful way is an expression of intelligence.
It’s not human level obviously, and it likely lacks advanced language abilities, but that doesn’t make it not an application of AI.AI is in a huge number if things,but we usually don’t label it because it’s usually not notable or interesting.
Lol no, a bunch of control and recursive statements is not an AI hahaha.
I bet you played Akinator and were befuddled by it lolz
I appreciate how you ask a question, and when someone answers you just say “no” and insult them.
Did you know that you can just search for this stuff and learn for yourself instead of being aggressively ignorant?
Are you one of those people who thinks that AI means “a human level intelligence”, or some sort of magic system that doesn’t involve control flow?
I had to look up what Akinator was, but yes, that game is using AI because statistical classification and knowledge retrieval are AI tasks.
If befuddledment is an insult for you, I do t know what to tell you.
Hate to break it to you again but a bunch of ifs is not an AI hahaha 🤣
Do you know how machine learning algorithms work?
Because that’s what they are by definition. Expert systems are a type of AI.
They’re working on that, the easiest bits come first and creativity is easier than ordered thinking and data analysis. People with diminished brain function often use art as therapy and create very creative things, they never analyze and compare datasets for therapy though…
Image gen is a huge part of making useful tools, what we see as the final product- an image generator is actually just a side product of teaching CV to recognize items and apply human labels, this is what will allow you to tell it ‘look for red shoes with funky tassels’ and it can do it for items not tagged with those descriptions. Plus a million other really useful things, like ‘watch granny for signs of distress’ without having to explain yes having her hand caught in a loom is distressing.
Also current ai are mostly toys because it’s safer to practice and explore toys than tools, it won’t be long before you’re saying ‘you kids don’t know about old search, you had to know she what you were looking for and where it should be…’
The cheapest way to get groceries in the States has always been do all your grocery shopping in the same store, preferably a discount store like an Aldi, instead of cutting coupons and going to multiple different stores due to the simple fact that the gasoline used for driving around is most likely going to cancel out any saving from shopping around, an unfortunate side effect of America’s car centric infrastructure.
You don’t really need an AI to make this list, plus, I think there are apps that already trying to do exactly that.
However, getting a computer to draw yourself in ridiculous situations (usually with an equally ridiculous number of fingers) is great entertainment.
going to multiple different stores due to the simple fact that the gasoline used for driving around is most likely going to cancel out any saving from shopping around
I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion. Here in suburbia, there are different stores every couple miles. Figure even a 5-mile detour to go to another store, and that “simple fact” of gasoline used turns out to cost less than a dollar. I save that much on a pair of salad kits by going to one store over another, and it’s really more of a one-mile detour anyway. Plus, there are simply things that one store does better than the other and I like to take advantage of that too.
Seriously. Sale items are often several dollars cheaper per item. It is well worth the time and gas driving to several stores unless they are very far apart, then just roll that into another trip. Some big “what could it cost, 10 dollars?” vibes off that comment.
You also need to factor in opportunity cost or concede that your free time doesn’t have value.
If you value your free time at the same rate that you work hourly, then suddenly it’s very hard to save money by spending more time. If you value free time as overtime equivalent, it gets even worse.
Dude, we all waste more than enough time on any given day that we don’t need to worry about the value of losing a half hour to save tens of dollars on our grocery bill. I can’t imagine anyone using a site like this one is particularly worried about lost productivity during their free time.
30 minutes for 10 hours and all the unnecessary waste of gasoline? Hard, hard pass. In fact, I’d work so that this was punished, what a waste of a limited resource that harms the environment.
It’s not about “lost productivity”. It’s about what you enjoy doing. If you don’t enjoy shopping for food, it’s the same as if it were part of your job.
There are only two logical situations:
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You dislike shopping - you should go to one store maximum because your time is valuable. Get everything else delivered online. Do something you like in your free time.
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You like shopping - you should work for a shopping delivery service in your spare time. You can make hundreds of extra dollars and get your own groceries at the same time
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Standard IRS reimbursement rate per mile driven is 67¢ per mile this year, which is essentially the per-mile average cost for driving a car. But like, with this sort of thing everyone has their own personal calculus for what they want to optimize for. Do they want to save as much money as possible? Do they want to have fun while shopping? Do they want to shop as quickly as they can? A lot of people will balance these priorities against each other and come up with a solution that isn’t optimal in any one specific area.
This kind of small scale optimization is not really the best use case for AI anyway. Considering the actual cost of running that kind of code at a large scale… I’m not convinced the savings are worth it even setting aside the petrol issue.
AI doesn’t need to be in the hands of consumers. It should be a step removed, working behind the scenes to make all those basic foods cheaper before you even go shopping. It should be optimizing supply chains, reducing production costs, and otherwise making us more efficient at a societal level.
Which, well, in some cases it already is. Sadly many companies just use it to optimise their marketing 🙄
Both of those sound kinda dystopian. Because you just know the first one will start getting gamed by every company from the grocery companies trying to SEO the AI, to the big fossil fuel companies trying to get you to drive your car more.
I can’t wait for the technology to get basic enough where I can roll my own self hosted instance of it without it taking months. Because I can see a way it’s doable without a centralized service to get around that. But for mass consumer level, I can see that becoming true. But this can be applied to every bit of software currently. All of it can be ran by you, if you have time. Hell I’ve got my own cloud (hosted at my home ) music streaming service.
A lot of that is doable now - like, how many grocery stores are even nearby to someone, so writing a custom bit of code to check the website of each, one by one, and looking for previously manually-identified items could be automated.
One major downside is prioritization of large chain stores at the expense of smaller mom & pop ones that don’t maintain a constant inventory system accessible via the web. Someone could even volunteer their time to build them a database backend, but still they’d have to see the value in actually scanning the items every time or else it would quickly fall behind.
Yeah I was going to say, I’ve done similar for clients with regards to competitor pricing
Yeah, it wouldn’t be a huge lift if you’re familiar with python.
That’s precisely what I was thinking, but reflecting more on it, I don’t know how well it would handle the webpages, so maybe some other languages mixed in too (I’m out of date, maybe PHP?). If AI writing code worked it would lower the barrier, but I’m not certain we’re quite there yet to trust anything it would create.
Python web scraping is just fine, with the llms you.have the option of either extracting the html and having the LLM read.over that, or having a vision ai OCR the page and make its own decision of what to extract.
#!/usr/env/python import groceryshoppingoptimizer
How is making a picture of me as an astronaut “dystopian”?
Uses tons of energy which could ironically be used to get you to space for real (a lot more energy but at least you get a real experience).
The same technology can be used for widespread, low-cost, highly convincing misinformation and propaganda campaigns
The moon landing wasn’t faked, but I was there instead of Neil Armstrong. See these pics?
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You think the world will be better when literally anyone can create convincing misinformation and propaganda? Personally I prefer when that power is limited, even if there are still powerful entities that can do it
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I think everything gets better when it’s less centralized
Would it be better if everyone had access to nuclear weapons? Or biohazards?
Some things in this world, the fewer people that have access to them, the better. In a perfect world, we might have nobody have access to those things, but I’ll settle for few rather than many.
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In other words, we need to recognize that the real problem is that companies will always try to game the system for product differentiation/market segmentation purposes, so the real solution is for the government to create and enforce standards.
It’s honestly not that far off I bet. Though I bet once it does become viable, we’ll find that the best option is buying all your groceries from Amazon, or something like that.
The thing is, you don’t need technological advances for that. Someone could have built that ten years ago. No one did, because it’s a lot of individual, non-trivial steps.
Those stores may have that data online somewhere, but how you request it and in which format you get it, that’s going to be different for each store. Then you also need information where those stores are and need to integrate some navigation functionality between them.
And ultimately, your target users aren’t exactly willing to spend money, so good luck covering costs for your service.
You are basically giving all the reasons for why this hasn’t been done yet without AI, but none of the reasons for why this can’t be done with AI.
I know we like to be cynical about the advances of things like chat gpt, but I have found many uses that are very similar to what you describe below. Taking a problem that could be solved with tedious brute force and combining data from multiple sources and knowledge of a scripting language, but instead I ask chat gpt in just the right way and it will get me the answer.
Also worth noting, grocery store prices are easily accessible online now whereas 10 years ago they were not. It’s just a matter of time before AI gets access to this data and can integrate into whatever models it uses.
Well, no, I’m just saying the text generation stuff did not change anything about that process.
It can try to generate the right text for the requests to grab this data, but since there’s going to be practically no documentation for that out there, it will struggle to do so from just its training data alone.So, what you do instead is that you have a human figure out the API of each store that needs to be integrated + ideally a transformation of the returned data into a shared, documented format. And then you tell the text generation a trivial way for it to generate the text to make use of that.
So, basically you preface the whole user conversation with “If I ask for prices of Todd’s Tater Tots, run./prices_todds_tater_tots.shfor that and use the result according to the JSON schema inprices_store.schema.json.”.And then you repeat that for all the other stores, for some math API and some navigation API and then you’ve got a chance that the text generation figures out the right semantics of how these things should be called.
Semantics is what it’s good at. But the rest is still the same process as ten years ago.I think you’re under selling what chat gpt is capable of. It is able to take outside data in and use it with the rest of the model. Bing does it with its web index data. I was able to ask what the cheapest gas station near me is and bing gave me a list, likely coming from gas buddy.
Or, it wouldn’t ever be truly accurate. That would be an anti-capitalism tool and mangled or completely killed in order to ensure profit
Ok am I wrong or was this not what Google Assistant used to be in the 2010s?
It still is. Problem is if you ask it this you might have to triple check what it tells you because it will most likely be wrong.
This is so sad. I bet Alexa can’t even play Despacito anymore if I ask her to.
When that song went viral, it was played so much that the collective power draw could have powered 40.000 households for a year.
The first iterations of Google Now felt useful in a similar way. Google was already squeezing data out of me, but it did so by marketing a palatable service.
Yeah, but then idiots felt it was too invasive, so now Google just collects the same amount of data or more… but without as much benefit to the user.
Well, Google tried it with their Assistant many years ago, people got scared how smart it was and it got nerfed into a ground.
Any generative AI that was trained using the entirety of the Internet is gonna suck as an information tool, since it will have more bad information in it than correct information and its goal isn’t to make sure the info is accurate; its goal is to output text that looks intelligent and isn’t obviously generated by a computer.
Even if you fed it nothing but correct information, it will still end up blending multiple things into a single output, generating inaccurate information.
I don’t want AI that just generates shit anywhere but in a video game. I want a tool that can go through real data and give me the relevant stuff I am asking for. Which was handled better with whatever Google was doing 20 years ago than whatever the fuck AI shit they got going on now.
I don’t want AI that just generates shit
You vastly underestimate the demand for mediocre crap that exists in the world.
Then why not train an AI on the entirety of Wikipedia? I know it’s not all correct, but that should ensure most of the information is decently accurate. Would make for a great tool if it allowed to get the same info but explained in a more casual manner.
You need an absolutely insane amount of data to train LLMs. Hundreds of billions to tens of trillions of tokens. (A token isn’t the same as a word, but with numbers this massive it doesn’t even matter for the point.)
Wikipedia just doesn’t have enough data to make an LLM off of, and even if you could do it and get okay results, it’ll only know how to write text in the style of Wikipedia. While it might be able to tell you all about the how different cultures most commonly cook eggs, I doubt you’ll get any recipe out of it that makes sense.
If you were to take some base model (such as llama or gpt) and tune it in Wikipedia data, you’ll probably get a “llama in the style of Wikipedia” result, and that may be what you want, but more likely not.
Would make for a great tool if it allowed to get the same info but explained in a more casual manner.
There’s a simple English Wikipedia.
I know it’s not all correct, but that should ensure most of the information is decently accurate
The problem is that a generative AI does not generate correct content, it generates associated content. It looks at words/term/tokens that are frequently used together to generate a context, and will extrapolate on that, continuing to provide content that looks the teaching content.
The problem is that this will generate materials that LOOKS LIKE CORRECT material, but it doesn’t generate material that IS CORRECT. Thankfully for AI, those things overlap a lot, but they don’t always.
You don’t need “AI” for that. All you would need is some standardized APIs for the various shops, and you could easily solve this with computer technology from 20 years ago.
The reality is, though, that there are no such APIs. LLMs on the other hand could be a valid tool for the use case.
At the cost of huge amounts of wasted energy and the whole litany of concerns that are always co-morbid with AI, but technically yes they could work for this lol. Ideally we’d have standardized APIs and mandated pricing transparency, but unfortunately we live in a capitalist society where that will literally never happen ever.
LLMs are not a good tool for processing data like this. They would be good for presenting that data though.
Llms are great for scraping data
LLMs don’t scrape data, scrapers scrape data. LLMs predict text.
Puppeteer and gpt-vision are decidedly not LLMs
Make an LLM convert the data into a standardized format for your traditional algorithm.
There’s no way to ensure that data will stay in that standardized format though. A custom model could but they are expensive to train.
Llms are excellent at consuming web data.
Not if you want to ensure the validity of the compiled coupons/discounts. A custom algorithm would be best but data standardization would be the main issue, regardless of how you process it.
What does validity mean in this case? A functionary LLM can follow links and make actions. I’m not saying it’s not “work” to develop your personal bot framework, but this is all doable from the home PC, with a self hosted llm
Edit and of course you’ll need non LLM code to handle parts of the processing, not discounting that
It’s not that there’s no API. It’s that there’s probably a different API for every single grocery store. And they make random changes and don’t have public documentation. That’s why we need the AI.
Yup, exactly, no standardized APIs.
Indeed. LLMs read with the same sort of comprehension that humans have, so if a supermarket makes their website compatible with humans then it’s also compatible with LLMs. We have the same “API”, as it were.
LLMs can read the website, but I’d argue its comprehension works VERY differently than human comprehension. If I ask you whats the price of a Banapple, you’ll know that doesn’t exist. The LLM might catch that thing doesn’t exist, or it might average all the prices of all the Apple associated data it has and all the banana associated data it has, regardless of unit, and give you that averaged price, or otherwise make up a logic to deliver you a price. It doesn’t know shit about fruit in the way you intuitively understand fruit.
Or you could just prompt it to not guess prices for articles that don’t exist. Those models are pretty good at following instructions.
That sounds like an issue with your system prompt. If you’re using an LLM to interpret web pages for price information then you’d want to include instructions about what to do if the information simply isn’t in the web page to begin with. If you don’t tell the AI what to do under those circumstances you can’t expect any specific behaviour because it wouldn’t know what it’s supposed to do.
I suspect from this comment that you haven’t actually worked with LLMs much, and are just going off the general “lol they hallucinate” perception they have right now? I’ve worked with LLMs a fair bit and they very rarely have trouble interpreting what’s in their provided context (as would be the case here with web page content). Hallucinations come from relying on their own “trained” information, which they recall imperfectly and often gets a bit jumbled. To continue using a human analogy, it’s like asking someone to rely on their own memory rather than reading information from a piece of paper.
Can LLMs interpret structured input like html?
Yup. And those that can’t can have a parser pull just the human-readable text out, like a blind person’s screen-reader would do.
No, that’s why we need regulations to enforce standards.
The stores don’t want you to have easy comparable access to their prices.
They’d quite like it if you just came in, saw that the item you wanted is out of stock, and then just buy some shit you didn’t need.
Yeah, we’re not going to make technology that drives prices down
You just need someone to do it. Here in Austria someone did it: https://heisse-preise.io
It’s only in German and most of the prices aren’t from a public API but crawled from different sources.
It’s open source. Nothing except greed is stopping them from providing something like this.Imagine if instead of building their own bespoke systems, grocery stores (and other places) created an open source software foundation and worked together to produce the software they needed.
I sometimes dream of such things. Less waste, better inventory, customers get to choose inventory based on their wishlist, better prices, then I wake up.
We actually have a small liquor store nearby that really puts stuff on the shelves if you casually mention something you like. But that’s more the exception than the rule.
there are no such APIs
Yes there are. You can obtain access to the Kroger API, the Meijer API, the Walmart API, and I’m sure others that I didn’t bother to Google. Failing getting access to the actual APIs, there are tons of web scraper projects that just parse those stores’ websites for product information, and web scrapers are still orders of magnitude more efficient than LLMs.
Calling it now, some tech bro trust fund kid is going to make a start up for this and call it something markety like fresh4u or some shit. Then when everyone is using it they’ll sell your data to China.
All you would need is some standardized APIs for the various shops
Stores: “I’m going to stop you right there”
Reality. ‘AI’ application just spyware that tracks your spending habits and sells them to mega corps that then adjust the products and pricing to you to maximise profits. Uptake is below investor expectations as most intelligent people realise the service is an expensive con. VC funds run out and backend is shut down. User left with expensive non-functional device.
I want AI to die and be replaced
Magic 8 ball says: zombies. Yay!
