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Biggest question I have is maybe... just maybe... LLM's would have had sufficient intelligence to handle micropayments. Maybe we might not have gone down the mass advertising "you are the product" path?

Like, somehow I could tell my agent that I have a $20 a month budget for entertainment and a $50 a month budget for news, and it would just figure out how to negotiate with the nytimes and netflix and spotify (or what would have been their equivalent), which is fine. But would also be able to negotiate with an individual band who wants to directly sell their music, or a indie game that does not want to pay the Steam tax.

I don't know, just a "histories that might have been" thought.

by throwaway133372 hours ago|

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Maybe we needed to go through this dark age to appreciate that sort of future.

This sort of thing is more attractive now that people know the alternative.

Back then, people didn't want to pay for anything on the internet. Or at least I didn't.

Now we can kill the beasts as we outprice and outcompete.

Feels like the 90s.

by charcircuit3 hours ago|

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Why wouldn't there be monopoly power? Popular API providers would still have a lot of power.

by SV_BubbleTime3 hours ago|

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If I can get videos from YouTube or Rumble or FloxyFlib or your mom’s personal server in her closet… I can search them all at once, the front end interface is my LLM or some personalized interface that excels in it’s transparency, that would definitely hurt Google’s brand.

by charcircuit2 hours ago|

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Controlling the ability to be recommended and monetized to billions of people is still powerful.

by daxfohl3 hours ago|

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I don't exactly mean APIs. (We largely have that with REST). I mean a Gopher-like protocol that's more menu based, and question-response based, than API-based.

by galkk2 hours ago|

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What is in it _for them_?

Where and how do they make money?