One could argue that Google Ads are jacking up the prices of hotels.
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.
The article mentions that the "best" airfyer seller also has to place bids on their names / keywords, but I don't think there's a best, just like there's no best shoes. There are so many niches that exist in products — does it fit in a tight space, what's the shape, what's the air-frying technique, do the buttons work with oven mitts — so there are different bestsellers in each subcategory.
Assuming that Operator does become better (as the models have), and the cost of operation goes down, I would pay a monthly subscription to reduce my screentime. I wonder whether a UI for a new company is even needed in the future.
I think this opens a new direction in terms of UI for companies like Instacart or Doordash — they can now optimise marketing for LLMs in place of humans, so they can just give benchmarks or quantized results for a product so the LLM can make a decision, instead of presenting the highest converting products first.
If the operator is told to find the most nutritious eggs for weight gain, the agent can refer to the nutrient labels (provided by Instacart) and then make a decision.
This reminds me of a scene in the latest entry to the Alien film franchise where the protagonists traverse a passage designated for 'artificial human' use only (it's dark and rather claustrophobic).
In the future we might well stumble into those kind of spaces on the net accidentally, look around briefly, then excuse ourselves back to the well-lit spaces meant for real people.
To me, this is an equivalent of a platform fee. If you didn't have a search platform, you'd most likely go with the big players, overpay, have a bad experience & be worse off.