Yes the marketplace supports our e-commerce platform, Openfront, for now but is built with adapters so any platform can be connected.
We felt AI was the perfect glue between different types of stores and could navigate them using intelligence. An example of this is being able to paste in your address in chat and AI will figure out which is the country, state, etc. Different stores handle addresses differently.
The difference is stores own everything. When someone buys, payment goes straight to the store's account. Customer data goes to their system. The marketplace just queries their existing API and renders it conversationally. Orders show up directly in the store's platform. They don't have to log into anything new or manage multiple dashboards. We never touch the money or data.
This system would function similarly to platforms like WooCommerce or Shopify, but with the key differentiator of being integrated directly into your search engine/chat interface, instead of Google, Amazon, or ChatGPT, right? What is your monetization strategy? Ads? monthly fee to show up on the engine?
Also, you're adding a discovery platform where businesses have to compete against other businesses for visibility and customers. Why would I choose to, yet again, help create another "aggregator" to the already saturated "aggregator" market (Amazon, Shopify, Google, ChatGPT, etc.)?
Btw, I'm not trying to bash your idea. The reason I ask is that businesses (even smaller ones) don't pay just for software, but for everything else (support, etc), and among those things, software too, and frankly, the main problem 15 years ago was discovery, but with social media (Twitter, ig, and now TikTok), discovery itself is a solved problem.
We sell the software. Openfront is open source e-commerce platforms for every vertical (retail, restaurants, salons, hotels). Businesses get the full source code, self-host or host with us. That's our business.
This marketplace doesn't charge transaction fees because stores already have their own infrastructure. We're just connecting to it. Marketplace operators who fork this can charge flat listing fees or affiliates, but the model works because discovery is separate from infrastructure.
On discovery being solved: social sends traffic to your site, but checkout still happens on your platform. Same here. The difference is stores aren't locked in. They expose a standard interface once and automatically work with every marketplace using that protocol. One store can be listed on multiple marketplaces serving different audiences without any extra integrations.
You're right that businesses pay for more than software. But they also shouldn't have to pay 15-30% transaction fees when they already own the checkout stack. That's the shift.
I agree with this. I don't know how to create artistic styles by hand or using any creative software for that matter. All the LLM tools out there gave me the "ability" and "talent" to create something "good enough" and, in some cases, pretty close to the original art.
I rarely use these tools (I'm not in marketing, game design, or any related field), but I can see the problem these tools are causing to artists, etc.
Any LLM company offering these services needs to pay the piper.
This is stupid. Companies are really trying to get people to hate everything tech related. From "smart" beds, to "smart" fridges, and with the "looming" job displacement due to "AI" and robotics, I could see how a "human-centric" economy or new wave of businesses and startups with a "human-centric" approach could develop in few years.
Hardly, they are burning money with TikSlop, they don't even know how to monetize it, just YOLO'd the product to keep investors interested.
Even the porn industry can't seem to monetize AI, so I doubt OpenAI who knows jack shit about this space will be able to.
Fact is generative AI is stupidly expensive to run, and I can't see mass adoption at subscription prices that actually allow them to break even.
I'm sure folks have seen the commentary on the cost of all this infrastructure. How can an LLM business model possibly pay for a nuclear power station, let alone the ongoing overheads of the rest of the infrastructure? The whole thing just seems like total fantasy.
I don't even think they believe they are going to reach AGI, and even if they did, and if companies did start hiring AI agents instead of humans, then what? If consumers are out of work, who the hell is going to keep the economy going?
I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.
> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.
The previous couple of crops of smart people grew up in a world that could still easily be improved, and they set about doing just that. The current crop of smart people grew up in a world with a very large number of people and they want a bigger slice of it. There are only a couple of solutions to that and it's pretty clear to me which way they've picked.
They don't need to 'keep the economy running' for that much longer to get their way.
> I just don't understand how smart people think this is going to work out at all.
Thats the thing, they arent looking at the big picture or long term. They are looking to get a slice of the pie after seeing companies like Tesla and Uber milk the market for billions. In a market where everything from shelter to food is blowing up in cost, people struggle to provide/have a life similar to their parents.
How can you take the market for billions when you are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions? Amazon overtook Walmart and cloud computing, they have a solid business model, and I doubt even a business that size could pay down that outlay. Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?
> Are we really saying that by some miracle OpenAI, or Anthropic are going to find a use case that would make places like Amazon and Apple look like relatively small business?
I thought the replacement of all desk jobs was supposed to be that joking not joking usecase
“Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of.”
It can only be "not as bad as you think" if the people currently at the top don't continue to hoard all the gains.
If the current system is maintained—the one where if you don't work, you don't earn money, and thus you can't pay for food, shelter, clothing, etc—then it doesn't matter how abundant our stuff is; most people won't have any access to it.
In order for society to reap the benefits of post-scarcity, we must destroy the idea that the people at the top of the corporate pyramid deserve astronomically more money than the people actually doing the work.
Charging me for stuff I am not using is why I will sooner rather than later leave google. It's ridiculous how they tack on this non-feature and then charge you as if you're using it.
For ChatGPT I have a lower bar because it is easier to avoid.
Interesting. So, we're going to deny that most of the IP theft from China up to this moment? Do you even think China is this advanced just because of chinese innovation? C'mon man.
The comment I replied to was dismissing a research paper describing innovation from a chinese company wrt more effective use of their hardware, by insinuating that it must be propaganda with no supporting reasoning.
Of course China has copied foreign technologies, I didn't say they haven't. My point is that you guys love to hang on to that as an excuse to dismiss everything from China even when they're obviously plenty capable of doing R&D in many fields, even with it having gotten its start off "stolen" IP.
America "stole" plenty of rocket technology from Germany, yet it's well understood that they eventually innovated on it and made it their own. But somehow whenever China's involved, you guys come out with your unsubtle bigotry.
