John Collison: belief

Transcript context

…I mean, the contrast between your own OpenAI announcement and Google's announcement I think is pretty interesting and speaks to what the companies are driving for. OpenAI wants to be the place where you do everything. They want to be like the aggregator. I think a critic would say people compare them to Netscape. I think the better analogy if you're an OpenAI skeptic would be AOL, where they want to be the interface for everything that you might do and it goes through their channels. And Google, just as they were relative to AOL is like, “Actually we want to equip everyone knowing that if everyone is capable, we are the greatest beneficiaries because we still marshal the front-end demand in that regard.” Now, how does that actually manifest in terms of commerce? The funny thing about tech is I don't think it will manifest in terms of airplane tickets, which is everyone's example. Everyone can never think of a better example than that, but what is the AI going to buy? What is it going to get? I don't know. I think I would like to think people will want to have agency in their buying decisions, but then again, we have assistants, whether it be like for work or whatever it might be, and they make buying decisions that we're necessarily not involved in and that I think is a good predictor precursor of what people will ideally… Do I really need to know… Actually, I have very strong paper towel ideas. That was going to be my….But once that's set, can that be sort of monitored and done? So I don't know. I think this is a very unsatisfying answer, other than to say it has big implications on things like advertising and on things like is that going to be a viable business model going forward? What margins are going to be available? Is there going to be perfect competition? Things along those lines. Okay. Let me try this on you for agentic commerce and I'm curious to have you critique it, which is sort of how I see things playing out. I think some skepticism is triggered by people pitching a very far end state with a lot of agentic autonomy. And so it's like, "Please book me a honeymoon in Japan and all the activities." It's like no one actually does things that way. Whereas actually you should go from the bottom up in some very basic building blocks where step one is just replacing filling out web forms. That's an activity that sucks. No one likes it. And so imagine you find the winter jacket you like and you copy the URL into ChatGPT and just say, "Please buy this for me." And that's a much better experience than going and clicking around a site you've never been to before. And so there's just the agents doing the kind of tool use on your behalf and everyone can create that. Maybe it clarifies there's multiple colors, which one do you like? But it's just replacing filling out form fields. This is, by the way, one thing that I am very…A lot of people are skeptical of this, but I am very optimistic about, which is, I call it ‘just in time UI’.…

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