TBF, the reason Apple removed "Apple Intelligence" is that they failed to deliver on its promises.
So much so that they just settled their false advertising in a class action lawsuit for $250M:
Also, P.S: Not to say that clothing/shopping is the primary use case, but I know plenty of women who use AI for clothes/fashion/interior decoration etc related tasks.
Apple engineers spend months trying to prompt engineer their way, thinking the prompter is at fault if the soon to be AGI system diverged. Some of these instructions were trending out there, as reveals of how naive Apple was at the time. They could be traced from the device's logs so not so much of a leak: Don't hallucinate, strictly follow instructions, followed by all sort of refined predicates, appended as if an LLM had reason
Then Apple released a paper to warn everyone (well, a few, and to save face) that we are getting fooled.
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...
In case Apple is a biased anti AI propagandist, here is a similar, more recent research paper from MIT and co:
Please put a date on your research papers! I could figure it out roughly by looking at the "last accessed" date on their citations - 2025-05-15.
It sounds totally insane but we’re the minority here. That’s why Google is a $4.5 trillion company.
Just feels crazy to me, but I guess that's what addiction looks like.
Purchasing upon ads is the opposite. Trading dollars (and freewill) for time (along with painkiller to having to have personal taste)
Sure some stuff sticks but most falls off the wall and is axed barely half way into the product life cycle.
Pepole around me don't even know what google is doing besides search and probably maps.
I'm the person with an adblocker, the others are not.
Who is Googles target audiance? Its not me. I might only be a target for when i run some IT Platform in my work as an architect.
I think this is an easy question to answer: 1. what's your monthly ad spend? 2. how many ads did you view lasy week? You're probably not their target.
If you're not failing often, you're not an innovative company.
This has always been the way Google has worked. This is why they are literally the most successful company in the history of the world.
They also have failures, then again most companies have failures as well at all points in the product cycle.
Failures like YouTube, GMail and Android?
Normies HATE customizing their devices. Children will literall reach for AI instead of search engines when they just want to change a background image.
Jailbreak is a slur for "Installation" that tech companies want to keep that way.
If I need to buy something new in order feel like I'm having 'fun', then I try to ask 'why' as many times as necessary to work out what hole I'm actually trying to fill, or what scratch I'm trying to itch. There are a couple of second hand items I want to buy off Gumtree, but I have no immediate need for them, they'd be for some future situation that's more likely than not to be only theoretical. Knowing that they are there, available, makes me want them, rather than some actual existing purpose.
> to find out about new things to buy.
I would interpret this as "to find out why I should feel unhappy and empty that I don't own these things".
On things that look nice, yes, I've got some nice art, but there's a limited amount of space in which to put up nice looking things, and if you're buying them frequently then you're either throwing out a lot or you're having to store a lot. Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks remotely nice advertised on the Internet; or at least looks nice and isn't, in actuality, mass-produced shit that's been polished up.
Having said that, if I had more money to throw away I'd do up my study like an old-school English manor-house library, full matching bookshelves, wainscoting, desk and chair. That's purely 'looks nice' and I would throw away the patchwork that currently furnishes my study. I'll say that's been advertised to me through (un)intentional 'product placement' in movies and TV shows, rather than Internet advertising though.
I am a basic human being, however.
I think the problem with HN/Engineer types is they basically never see ads designed to appeal to them because they aren't a large enough audience.
To me that's like living in a transparent house where your landlord can always watch you but it's fine because you really like the nice showerhead.
(I hate ads too, but I think I understand the alternative perspective).
Even as a kid, me and all my friends used to groan when the commercial breaks came on. I've been muting commercials since I knew how to use a mute button.
And I did use AI recently when shopping for a car. After doing a bunch of research on my own, I decided why not try feeding my criteria into ChatGPT and see what it recommends. And it did actually recommend a couple of models that I had not previously considered, including one that I ended up considering very seriously.
I also pointed it towards some used listings and asked questions like "does this listing have ventilated rear seats" - and it was able to respond that it likely doesn't, and told me where to look for the controls in photos to verify for certain. I probably could have figured out on my own with a bit of digging, or else contact the seller, but this was a pretty quick and easy way to get the information I was looking for.
Is that gross?
I didn't look too closely at the Googlebook, so I don't know why I would use that instead of just an app on my MacBook. But at some point when competent models can be run on comodity hardware I think hardware and OS-level support for AI will definitely become a selling point for me. We're just not quite there yet.
LLMs don’t ‘know’ if a pair of jeans is a tapered slim fit with a gusseted crotch, at least not by default. But if the brand uploaded them as such, the filters will find them.
That’s just a quick take. I’ve tried to shop with LLMs and the results are mediocre at best. Of course search, filtering, and content tagging could always be improved, instead of “just slap AI on it”.
This is more than just search + filtering. I've done similar things when trying to visualize home improvements, and find that it really is a useful way to help validate my ideas.
So far a lot of the negative responses I've gotten have been along the lines of "only a fool would let AI do your thinking for you". But I find that it's a useful tool sharpening my thinking. Brainstorming, overcoming my own personal biases and gaps in my knowledge, idea validation, etc. Like "rubber ducking" [1], but the duck actually responds with some pretty insightful advice with surprising frequency.
Do I "need" AI for shopping? No, of course not. Can it reduce friction and lead to more informed buying decisions in certain cases? In my experience, yes.
Of course I've seen plenty of useless "just slap AI on it" jobs, too. Netflix put out an AI chatbot that I found particularly egregious, for example (I think maybe they've taken it down since). I didn't find Amazon's "Rufus" to be very trustworthy, either. And I know I'm coming across as pro-AI here, but in other matters I have plenty of serious concerns about AI. I'm just hoping to have a more nuanced conversation than "shopping with AI? Gross!". Or "only a fool would use a product built by greedy corporations!"
[1] https://theconversation.com/stuck-on-a-problem-talking-to-a-...
If Google was launching a new laptop that was meant to run models locally I would be really excited.
It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.
In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.
So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.
At no point in the process did ChatGPT direct me to any listings. I fed it my criteria, and it gave back a text response listing car models that met my criteria. The only links it included were links to reddit posts and other car reviews. And the results were useful to me because they pointed out where my own pre-existing biases had caused me to overlook one model that I probably should have paid more attention to.
What you are suggesting feels more like a potential future threat than my actual experience thus far.
I found the listings by conducting a separate search on a used car listing website - and the number of matches that met my criteria were small enough that I was basically able to look exhaustively through all the matches. But shopping for used cars can be a little confusing at times because there are a lot of different configurations that change every year. Sometimes the listing might just say something like "2022 Touring, Safety Package" and include a bunch of photos - and identifying whether a given listing has a particular feature you are looking for requires some investigation (ideally they would include a full list of options, but often times they don't). Or often times the listing itself might contain incorrect information. And I found ChatGPT to be a useful tool for quickly making sense of the various configurations, and of course conduct my own sanity checks to be sure the information is not hallucinated.
I'm not suggesting you should solely rely on AI for shopping (although in some cases for low-risk purchases it may be fine) - but rather as an additional tool to aid in research and decision making.
Do we really have to litigate this? Have you been on the Internet at all in the last 2 decades? Do you seriously think that even if that kind of advertising vector isn't being paid for today, it won't be tomorrow?
It is almost childishly naive to assume that these companies that are bleeding billions will have the ethical fortitude to say 'no' to Chevy / Ford / Jeep / Whoever when they offer them a check to make sure Toyota and Honda are unceremoniously just de-prioritized as recommendations.
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Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage. It's feasible that you might on certain smaller market segments (Cars, for example), but something with much more producers and products in the segment has no chance. You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved - all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.
Conflicts of interest are nothing new - dating back to newspapers, radio, television, and search engines. And yet in all of these mediums companies have figured out how to display sponsored content while still maintaining the trust of their users. AI companies have a similar vested interest in maintaining their users’ trust (not to mention adherence to current and future advertising regulations).
> Do we really have to litigate this?
Yes, if you are going to assume the worst possible outcome, then you must also explain why other outcomes - such as clearly distinguishing sponsored content from “informational” content - are not possible.
> Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage.
Which non-AI information sources promise complete market coverage?
> You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved
I agree this should be the end goal in decision making. And in my experience AI can be a useful tool to get there.
> all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.
ChatGPT doesn’t just give a list of results without context. It’s also quite good about justifying why it gives the results that it does. And you are free to ask follow-up questions, and fact check the responses against other sources.
I treat it the same as basically any other information source that I come across. I fully understand that it is not perfect. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not useful.
> I need dishwasher tablets
Could mean buy a 30 pack for £25 which have all the marketing buzz surrounding them, or buy the own brand 45 pack for £5 which does the job just as well.
As if the products you find in mass market brick'n'mortar stores are any different.
Yes, if you engage with the 'designed marketing channels' for products, you will end up with junk. If you want to have stuff that isn't junk, you need to do some leg work. A chatbot will not do that for you.
I want to make a picture from me, add perhaps height and one or a second other metric, then i want it to generate styles for me, finetune it with me and then it helps me buy it.
I'm waiting for this for ages as i HATE shopping but I would find it nice to look better.
Nonetheless, when I saw this page for the first time, i was very impressed with the case not with anything related to softeware. Might be a second type of device which might be a good alternative to an apple product. Framework and now this (perhaps)
Despite this, adidas does not have a tall thin filter despite them selling tall thin shirts in shops.
I do not know why.
Now i have to start searching around what brands have this option to filter.
I do not know why ecommerce online is so shit at least it feels shit for me.
If AI would find something in that price range and it would just work, man i would be happy.
Building your own is expensive, which is a stretch to cover with the margins of ecommerce and not go broke. And the off-the-shelf things are shockingly bad in their core functionality (e.g. Shopify, which may actually be the most developer-friendly and innovative, has no native concept of a color swatch that works the way you'd expect, nor does it have filtering other than by a single, painfully-manual, non-composable "tag" feature). Shopify's got a huge ecosystem of one-trick-pony "Apps" that add all the missing features, but running 50 "apps" doesn't fix things either - not only can they be fundamentally incompatible with each other, but nothing can fix the underlying deficiencies of the core data models (or if I'm being more charitable, their suitability for one's unique business domain).
Brands fit for the country of the store. For example, you won't find anything for a tall but not wide person in Singapore, except a few special stores, that won't be Adidas for sure. Unless ordering from overseas (and that costs nice money).
Because market. 1% just isn't worth it.
I saw a demo - it took you, put a piece of clothing on you, and showed in realtime how that clothing moved on your body in the size you'd selected. I think it even picked the size.
> No one is doing that, these people don't exist
I don't know what world you live in but I personally know at least 4 people (all female interestingly) who regularly use ChatGPT to give outfit advice and when clothes shopping. One has manually taken photos of clothes laid out separately so she can put different combinations into ChatGPT and ask if they work together.
I don't live in the US.
It's May and you chose a bright green and red sweater with a picture of Santa Clause.
"You're absolutely right! Maybe this would be a better choice for December."
I used to be vehemently against AI coding just a few years ago, because the hallucinations were a deal-breaker. However, these days, most of my code is written using AI. It's still very "corporate junior" so it takes constant tweaking, hand re-writing, or total re-architecting, but it's leaps and bounds better than what it was. And I find myself working on the interesting parts: product, user experience, novel algorithms, etc.
I genuinely don’t think when Chat GPT 3.5 launched, that anyone believed people would integrate the usage of them as quickly and solidly as they have.
So Im with you on this, people use Chat GPT, Claude and so on for anything and everything.
You’re on HN and know 4 females, that’s the truly interesting part :-)
Not super relevant to the Googlebook ad, but in case the perspective is interesting to you: I'm quite tall (194cm) but not very wide, so I usually struggle with buying clothes online. I used AI to scrape a bunch of clothing stores to see whether they sold a men's shirt with an LT or slim fit size, in stock, and matching a particular vibe.
An the same will happen to AI. We will remember these days as the golden age for AI, where you weren't required to prompt an AI three times before it answers with a non-ad response.
What it actually is: a salesperson
It took the mass public a long time (15 years?) to realize search engines had shifted from the former to the latter, and that allowed Google to leverage that misplaced trust into huge profits.
Expect commercial AI to be the same, unless it's explicitly set up otherwise (read: Kagi assistant).
This guy couldn't recognise the conflict of interest, and neither will 80%+ of AI users.
Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzbz0HDVKEs "Louis Theroux visits top gambler's Hilton hotel suite - Gambling in Las Vegas - BBC"
It even supports bidding for the ad space!
Source: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
But whether it's search or AI-chat, what's annoying is efforts to have it replace that things that exist rather than serving as useful addition. I use ChatGPT X many times a day (or hour) but unless I ask for an AI's opinion, I don't want it.
That's not how that works; "someone is doing this" doesn't prove a rule "no one is doing this" -- quite the opposite
"The exception that proves the rule" is for things like "closed Thursdays" (rule = open on other days), "no parking after 8 PM" (rule = parking allowed before 8 PM), "no refunds on games" (rule = refunds available on other items), etc.
Or more succinctly, as first-year law students learn: Expressio unius est exclusio alterius — to state one thing is to implicitly exclude others.
https://definitions.lsd.law/expressio-unius-est-exclusio-alt...
> "The exception that proves the rule" is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used…
Personally, I use it in cases like:
- Rule: Don't do X, it's a bad idea.
- Exception: One time, someone with very special circumstances did X, and with a lot of finagling and effort they managed to make it work sort of OK.
Or:
- Rule: This fortress was an impregnable defensive position.
- Exception: In A.D. 1305, the fortress was taken, with great difficulty and many casualties, by an attacking army 100 times larger than the defending force.
Or:
- Rule: This river never overflows its banks.
- Exception: Once in history, on the day of the biggest rainstorm in 1000 years, the river is recorded to have overflowed its banks very slightly for a short time.
The exception proves the rule because the circumstances necessary for the exception to occur were themselves exceptional.
For example, imagine if your skydiving instructor said "if your parachute doesn't open when you jump out of the airplane, you're gonna die", and you replied with "well actually that's not true, Vesna Vulović survived a fall from high altitude." Yeah, okay. The fact that you had to be smarty-pants about it and dig up a random exception really proves the point they were trying to make.
(Also that story is nuts! https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87)
People on this website are so fucking pedantic and argumentative over the most obvious or inconsequential minutiae it drives me nuts.
That they were responding to someone else who couldn't see how it worked means it wasn't just pedantic nitpicking
I didn't say it was personal, I said it was irritating.
Also sometimes when doing more complicated purchases that require multiple products, I use it to sift through Amazon.
Especially ChatGPT seems to be optimizing for this use case, like a “search engine that can actually reason” (by lack of a better description). It’s convenient, and saves me a lot of time compared to the mess that Google has become.
(Obviously it’s likely this will happen to AI as well in the future, but right now, it’s pretty good)
Obviously, a better search engine that also doesn't display ads is better. But is it $20/month better? When it's also got daily usage limits? And they're almost certain to start injecting ads as soon as they possibly can without alienating people?
Your phone and internet connections also have usage limits, and you’re also using them in various ways.
I agree that it’s extremely likely that, especially post-IPO, monetization will kill the current user experience, which I already hinted at in my previous comment.
Given the growing distrust of ad supported tech, I could see AI remaining as a paid product.
...seems more like a case against Amazon (search) than for AI, then.
Maybe I'm fortunate enough to live someplace where Geizhals[0] exists, but it's been years since I gave up on Amazon altogether. The bad UX is just user hostile and there are many competitively priced retailers with web shops anyway.
[0]: https://geizhals.eu/
These machines are general purpose technologies used by hundreds of millions of people. ChatGPT alone is used by over 900M people every week at least. You can count the technologies with that scale of users in your hand.
You'll never conceive all the sort of uses it could possibly have, much like nobody could ever conceive all the uses the internet had and will have and it would be misguided to think so. As you see, there's like 2 dozen people here telling OP the thing he thought 'No one' could possibly LLMs use for is in-fact seeing some use.
That's the problem. It moves an incredibly amount of power into a small handful of multinationals.
I don't want to live in a fucking world where an AI watches everywhere I go, reads everything I write, listens to everything I say, and makes decisions that affect me with zero appeal or recourse.
Because that's exactly where we are headed as people.
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As businesses, we are headed to a world where if you don't pay tribute to the AI syndicates, your business will be undiscoverable.
> I can imagine lots of cases where people with specific needs would find benefit from the “AI clothes buying” experience,
That is kind of the idea of serving the long tail. Everyone is unique, and there are a lot of everyones.
That said, I don't get online clothes shopping. The fit is 80% of the product.
Indeed it is, but when you are p95 (at least for height, but not overweight), you'll soon learn that you do not have any other option: common sizes stop growing in length (at least noticeably) usually at XL or even L, so you are looking for specific fits (long, slim) and those are rarely stocked in stores. Sometimes I'll try a model from one brand and buy a different colour online.
But enter online shopping and 14-30 day return windows.
Still, for formal wear (shirts, jackets, suits), I simply stick with made-to-measure and custom tailoring.
I ended up with a T14 Gen 4 and I'm super happy with it.
isn't that what search engines were built for? we've just forgotten how to build a search engine that's not just an ad factory, so instead we're putting an ad factory into our new search engine?
If I know what I'm looking for, Kagi is much easier.
If I don't know what I'm looking for (I have hobbies that involve learning new techniques, and my method for learning a new technique seems to involve getting inspired by short-form videos, which don't come with a glossary of terms or a dictionary of tool names, so I often don't know what I'm looking for) then I can describe it to claude who can usually come up with a name for the thing, some useful advice about it, and where to start looking.
Last time, as an example, was all about enamalling and cloisonne, which was quite a rabbit-hole. And yes, I could search for beginner guides for the thing. But that is going to land me at a YouTube video which has 5 minutes of "hi welcome to my show, hit the like and subscribe" and then 15 minutes of waffle before finally getting to "the thing you want is called a trivet". I can read way, way, faster than people on YouTube can get to the point, so I prefer talking to claude.
If you have a list of specific criteria, search engines are impossibly bad at finding what you’re looking for, but top LLMs do it with ease.
ChatGPT and Claude have been amazing timesavers in my recent tech acquisitions at work, and I find I am able to find better solutions
Chatgpt found me a lot more choices.
I wanted custom lifts for a shoe. Chatgpt found me a local store that did it, I'd been calling around for years asking to no avail.
Chatgpt is really damn good at niche stuff.
I feel like I see a brand new way of saying “something that people don’t really want” on a near daily basis nowadays
- mining the 95th percentile, leveraging the Pareto Principle
- optimizing and ubiquitizing under-optimized paradigms
- pioneering agentic solutions to aggressively expand product frontiers
- innovating high-risk strategies to serve underserved markets
- digging deep into the inner recesses of my being and extracting what's left of my soul through my nostrils
And so much more.
I don’t want to believe LLMs are the future of shopping either, but it’s wrong to dismiss actual successful users with hot air.
Using several AI models to cut through the multidimensional sea of options.
It's not all grim, thia technology can genuinely be helpful.
I previously would have spent this time opening up 4 tabs on three diff hardware store sites, and an additional tab to pull up the relevant car forums for tips and advice. Which I ended up doing anyways, as well as some YouTube videos because I don't trust the results. But it still saved me a ton of time investigating and weighing out options as a decent aggregator of info.
I have a half dozen facebook marketplace searches going. I used to automate craigslist searches before craigslist became irrelevant. It's nothing complicated but "AI searches for me and notifies me" is better than me remembering to look.
Well obviously you shop for clothes, but nowhere like the way people who like clothes shop for clothes.
Finding clothes is about matching the vision in your head. If you’re the type that just buy clothes whatever, this is not a problem that exists in your world.
You know, everyone used to have specific needs in clothing when I was young. Somehow fast fashion advertised that out of us to solve their own supply chain problems.
For the average consumer, clothes fit them.
There is no generalizability from a niche possible here, since the mass market is already served.
Beyond that, even if we limit it to height alone, there are hundreds of millions of people who are much shorter or much taller than average.
Quality is amazing, fit is incredible, and the price is only 20-30% more than off the rack, but the clothes can last a decade+.
Sometimes the ancient solution (meet another person with a measuring tape) is the best one.
I have one shirt where each button hole has contrast stitching around it, an absolute baller of a shirt.
Even if they cost me $200 today it'd be worth it. They last so long and being able to define your exact own personal style feels great.
Love the idea but difficult problem to fix.
I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.
Or have shopping items be shown on your twin in a simulated fashion shoot on a doppelganger simulation. It should also show movement, situations and vibes.
"Turning Doug Quaid back into Carl Hauser"
Yet on the other hand, I've got a very extensive page of me wearing and using a bunch of different things. (see link in bio) It'd be interesting(?) to have a hundred(?) fans(?) wear what I wear. Some may be my size, most wouldn't be. I don't know how this world would end up. I presume it's about building a sort of "icon kingdom" or mob of Mr. Andersons. It may be utopian if you find the right community.
It's not just about size and fit, but what people may be looking for is vibe, community and vision. The interplay between fashion and sub-culture is not always so clear. People may want belonging and community, but will that sacrifice individuality and freedom-of-thought? Would you rebel until anarchy or to improvement? What's the focus and vision of your life? Times by 1000 and you're impacting the world through a prayer-like scenario.
This is a good one: https://tallslimtees.com/
I also do some made to order from Son of a Tailor and Proper Cloth, but it’s expensive and laborious and slow and risky.
I'm genuinely curious, whatever you're doing sounds cool, but more details beyond the buzzword pitch you'd tell your manager would be welcome on a hard technical site like hn?
(ftr, I'm skeptical of all applications of machine learning, but I keep experimenting with all the various kinds of it, generally with no good result; last real-world useful [to any extent] ml model I tried was BASnet, but whatever you tinkered out sounds cool and if it actually scrapes and filters clothes the way you describe, that'd be quite cool [perhaps even product worthy…?], cuz there are way too many clothes online to look at all of them manually and then esp. on fast fashion sites, there are oftentimes reviews you want to be wary for that indicate low quality products… anyway, that just sounds impossible to automate in my experience, but feel free to prove otherwise)
Was it a technically impressive effort from the prompter? No. Are the tools created in the session somehow a massive technical achievement? No. But was it a very useful result? Yes. It took the kind of task that would likely never get done otherwise, and turned it into the kind of thing that got done on a whim.
Doesn't mean that your laptop needs "AI buttons" though.
(I mean honestly the project idea[?] they posted sounds like daydreaming some science fiction scenarios, otherwise with all the hype and investment around chat bots, this way of shopping would definitely be mainstream already. If it weren't daydreams, that is. But if my grandma had wheels, she would've been a bicycle, no…?)
What was done is more like using the LLM as a personal assistant that doing long manual labor to find what you might be looking for.
This way of shopping is already a thing. "Hype and investment" goes into how the companies can monetize AI harder (ads! integrated LLM shopping! business development! premium pro max enterprise data policies!), it doesn't really focus much on how the individual can save time and money through non-flashy tasks.
Well, that assumes descriptions are extremely accurate down to the last seam, which is not true. You'd be better off considering reviews and photos, esp. user provided photos, you also need to take into account the model/s in the photos are not necessarily shaped the same as you, so you need to somehow counter that bias in training. This is simply not a task achievable with current ml techniques, however again, feel free to prove otherwise.
(and ftr, I'm of course making a basic assumption that we're past the topic of markov chain/'llm' based chat bots at this point? Those are completely irrelevant to the goal of categorizing clothes based on some characteristics [i.e. the so-called 'vibes'])
My friend is probably 5" shorter than me. A small on him would be too long.
So he's always on the hunt for things that fit him properly in both dimensions.
By using AI to filter out results, you don't see ads, upsells, other products, recommendations, reviews, dark patterns, etc.
Just asking a web search / browser-enabled chatbot, as you are now, is already close to the optimally efficient tool for you. Unfortunately, aggregating results from many disparate retailers into one seller-neutral page filtered down to what you uniquely need today is no longer considered optimally efficient by most web retailers. Just like they erected barriers to stop being indexed by unaffiliated shopping aggregators, most large retailers will try to stop automatic aggregation of their current inventory (or lack thereof).
Sadly, we're now in a post-enshittification world where Amazon's learned removing search features like requiring or excluding terms increases revenue and Google's learned giving you the search result you want first reduces ads served.
As far as this laptop is concerned I feel like it's a repeat of that super expensive chrome book that fizzled out because it was basically nerfed by Google unshockingly. As one of the top posters here if they delivered quality hardware, good Linux and solid Google support and even gapps, this would be an absolute win. instead i can only guess what this is unless I missed any real information on the site it's just a metal Chromebook with extra AI?
I don't know how good AI is at these kinds of tasks, but I can tell you that it's not easy manually, especially in some parts of the world where you might have to factor in shipping/return costs.
I wonder if for the next period websites will really try hard to prevent scraping (already happening, in some industries very pervasive, i.e. its impossible to get accurate quote for power) until they realize they can sell much more to people using agents.
Or everything just going to race to the bottom like a manufacturer or distributor since it's so easy to find everything anything you need. Kinda already happening with saas companies loosing value while infrastructure is soaring.
It is deeply annoying we have to do this.
It's a frustrating existence.
It’s amazing how confident you are while being completely wrong. A pristine internet rant.
Also aren’t you concerned your behaviour is marketers’ wet dream? They now dictate what you should consume.
That said, for specific queries—e.g. "I need a linen sportcoat that is beige/natural. What are some brands? My price range is $XXX"—it is very good.
At least i'm not buying pants every month.
Btw. you know who is buying my stuff? My wife :P
Got something that fits and is working: something that, even if I'd done some more homework on my own, I might not have gone with because I would have been hung up on finding a perfect, 1:1 replacement.
Welcome to HN? :)
“Just had a baby, generate a shopping list for my registry”
“For each major item on registry, research and recommend the top 3 products. I care about GreenGuard certification. I’m not price sensitive.”
“I’m looking for new shoes. I’ve previously owned XYZ models and here’s what I liked/disliked. Can you recommend shoes I should consider?”
It’s immensely helpful. It replaces what I used to do before which was typically search for “[product] Reddit” and read and sift through a ton of comments.
It’s not perfect but the volume of transactions I’d have to do research for is high enough and the return policies easy enough that it makes mistakes feel much easier to correct.
Tangental rebuttal, but I shop for food using AI every day. Grab app (Asia's equivalent of Uber Eats/DoorDash) has an option "Translate using AI". It (attempts to) translate dishes and ingredients. The app gives a prominent warning (in corporate speak): "these AI translations can be horrendously bad" - and some translations are indeed way off (often hilariously!) but although scrappy, this AI feature is incredibly useful.
Before this feature, I'd have to laboriously screenshot (since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS) then open the screenshot in Google Translate. This only gets you one screen's worth of translations making browsing too arduous.
A shitty AI feature that actually solves a problem is great, whereas a polished AI feature that doesn't is "gross" :)
> since you can't select text in most delivery apps on iOS
This is all you need to know about mobile to understand we're in a complete duopoly that desperately needs a modern "ma bell" style breakup.
The fuckers who make these devices have zero interest in allowing you to do anything other than spend money with them, of which they will take their cut.
The whole thing feels optimized for trapping users, not enabling them.
Unfortunately, they do. "Normie America" loves that shit. It's why they've been pushing it so hard: it's one of the few areas they're getting serious traction in day to day life.
Also, Japan is a cheap travel destination right now. Two people can do a 14 day trip easily for $3000 total. That's not nothing but it's also in the realm of many middle class people regardless of where they live.
Granted, I was thinking of my home airport, SFO. The tickets from there are <$800 a person round trip
I think this is more you than me. The middle class in America is still strong. Is it weakening and eroding? That is also true.
> Shelling out three grand for a two-week vacation is simply unattainable for the vast majority of the population.
Would you quote me where I said it was the majority, let alone vast?
Well, actually, depending on the data and who you ask, 40-60% of Americans spend $3000 a year on travel. Is 60% the majority? I'm not good at math.
https://www.ngpf.org/blog/question-of-the-day/question-of-th...
https://www.nerdwallet.com/travel/studies/summer-travel-repo...
So really, you may be the one who's disconnected from reality. Not to say that things aren't getting better, I think they're getting worse. Just that you've got a bit of a doomer mindset.
The data provided simply isn't sufficient to support the claim.
According to [1], the average American household spend $682 on airfares in 2024, plus an additional $199 on "Intercity bus, train, and ship fare"
There is spending data on "out of town" trips in [2] but it is extremely hard to work with.
If the average household spends $881 on these cost then it's probably at least reasonable to double that in total travel spend, so in round numbers at least $2000 is an estimate I'd believe.
It also makes $3000/year within reasonable bounds of possibility. But in terms of measuring how households are doing I'd note this is down from the 2023 numbers.
The normal issues with measuring average vs median apply etc.
[1] https://data.bts.gov/stories/s/Transportation-Economic-Trend...
I posted more than one article.
A $3000 trip is within reach of more Americans than you expected. I don't know why you're unhappy to find that out.
$2000/year on average seems a good estimate, and $3000/year is something that could be possible.
This is higher than I expected.
Not anymore. Disney now targets high income earners, not the average American.
Mate I'm in the EU and neighbor has got a statue of big gorilla on his balcony.
The EU is just as consumerist as the US. I can't tell you the number of young dudes who think they look cool because they're wearing a fake Hermes manpurse and who wear a cap as if a videoclip from the 90s from Vanilla Ice just called (don't get me wrong: I love Ice Ice Baby and I read Vanilla Ice is a good person. But it's 2026).
And there have been several EU companies getting funding to create an "AI personal shopper app" (all getting pwned by Google and other big players).
No really: the EU is incredibly consumerist too.
Though, people "want" a lot of things that actually end up making them less happy. So responding to demand doesn't necessarily make it a good thing, but only time will tell.
You wrote this remember
God this is so annoying. The actual functionality we need is not there or is half-assed.
Not only the actual functionality people want is missing, but the functionality they're nagging us to use is missing./
Out of all things you'd think they'd at least invest some time to run some quality control on the demo options lol.
Switch to a consumer Gmail account and loads of Google features start working.
Also the homepage search widget, the app drawer search, and chrome address bar search are three near identical experiences, yet with enough differences to be painful. Either unify them, or make them distinct!
You are not every other person. People are different from you.
While I 100% agree Ai is getting shoved down people's throats by tech giants, I would never presume to know how people are using it.
More people are discovering it, at least, as a better search box than Google. There's at least data behind that.
It isn't too far of a jump to then have it shop for you as well.
One thing that is interesting with stories like this: the wild, emotional responses Ai-related news gets out of people.
Part of this is that we are increasingly in self-selected communities of people just like us. Prior to the Internet and social media, you more often interacted with people that all you had in common with was spatial location and a dash of socio-economic status. It wasn't an unbiased slice of the populace, but it was at least less biased.
But today, it's much easier to have all of your social interactions limited to a social media bubble that reflects yourself.
That in turn makes it really easy to believe that whatever is true for you must be true for everyone because it seems to be largely true for all the people you see on a daily basis.
plenty of people are shopping online and in fact they are using the same services that this company provides to them. That is why this type of targeting is affective. Society has grown to a large customer base that is simply what they are everything is for sale. This makes the point that to sell a computer these days they have to imaging you are using it to shop, based on statistics that sad truth usually lies in numbers. How many hours a day is an average American looking for deals or the hottest thing out right now. Newer products are not event glamouring the specs of their devices it simply what you can do with them now that sets them apart from their competitor. Smartphones ads are mostly focused on the camera capabilities and the screen clarity, that is what today's average user is focused on along with how long in a day they can enjoy this new smartphone (battery). What worries me is how invested in the AI idea these companies are. You can see the great deal of hope they're emphasizing on.Not sure if this will last, but time will tell.
My friend just bought a Pixel instead of an iPhone because it had better AI voice chat integration, he's non-technical and has been on iPhone as long as I remember
I was getting more-consistent, useful responses from the then-new voice-operated modes in Android 2.0, ~16 years ago.
Even the paid version, which is included with my Workspace account, is awful. Every time I've tried to use it for something it has lied to me and then immediately followed that lie with a bullshit follow-up question.
Using it makes me feel angry. I don't like feeling that way.
But the voice implementation of it and integration into Android and Android auto is such a half assed attempt that is being slammed down my throat. It's offensive. And I agree, it's a regression compared to the very old AA auto assistant for basic tasks.
As a bonus feature: Because it's a workspace account, it forgets everything about what went wrong last time so every session is like a scene from the film Groundhog Day. It is apparently impossible to change this behavior even though I am the administrator.
Overall, I find its utility to be negative -- I'm worse with it than I am without it.
Which is remarkable, I think: I've been using ChatGPT since pretty early on in the demo days and paying for a Plus account for about as long as anyone ever could, and my opinion of that is generally positive. I've accomplished some fairly neat stuff with OpenAI's offerings that I wouldn't have been able to do on my own.
So I'm not generally averse to LLMs. I'm just averse to using Gemini to do anything more complex than turning on a light bulb. :)
I'm glad to hear that you're able to find some utility with it.
A while back I was driven nearly insane because I discovered that 90% of hiking pants don't have a rear left pocket. Some clothing designers have some specific vendetta against it that I just cannot figure out. As a user of said pocket who wanted to buy compatible hiking pants instead of changing my pocket usage habits, I wasted hours looking at photos and browsing physical stores to no avail. In the end I just surrendered and let $Skynet suggest some for me, which it happily did immediately.
I don't know which universe you hail from where Google Search would give that information prior to LLMs, but I don't think I came from that timeline.
But if your claim is that no one needs specific hardware to do that instead of just pulling up $Skynet.com, then I completely agree.
You may be the wrong gender to market this to, but giant numbers of shops and the space in those shops are devoted to one half of the population in general really liking buying clothes. Going shopping is a leisure activity. Retail therapy is a common phrase.
I also think it's not a great, world-changing, google-scale idea, but I'm probably the same gender as you.
Meanwhile Microsoft and Amazon is eating their cake with Azure and AWS. A whole new generation of smart kids is now starting their day with ChatGPT (not me, I do Claude, but same point), instead of Google... so for many people it is not Facebook nor Google Search where "the internet starts from". This is massive loss. Broadcom is probably going to eat at their push for in-house TPUs. And surely Apple already ate everyone's cake on the affordable laptop with Neo, which is incredible for Apple to do, as they've always been roughly 1.5 the price of windows competitors. And Apple did it years after Google forayed into Chromebook, which this Gemini Laptop basically is version 2.0 of. The moment ads start showing intertwined with GPT output, Google is roast, most their revenue is ad-based, no matter the very strong (and perhaps top) cloud tier and Android licenses. Regarding this - Fuchsia is still not used in any frontier product, and poor Android is so much Java-tied, that it basically lives in the 90s from in a certain sense.
We can only speculate what the reason for this all is, but I'll put a very unpopular bet on Google shrinking massively the next few years into something aggressively robotized which looks more an utility company, than a SOTA research camp. For what is worth IBM was clairvoyant enough to do this shrinking years ago, and now can brave for thousands of COBOL lines being rewritten, and then some layoffs. But IBM has evolved an ecosystem that keeps companies locked in many dimensions, similar to Oracle perhaps, while Google does not.
They are still very strong in versatile r&d. And AI would open many new opportunities.
*except maybe Valve.
ChatGPT has helped me with all the wired social things I have no clue about. Like how long should a suit jacket be, what to pair with loafers. And more often than not I buy the things ChatGPT suggest.
ChatGPT lets me be normal.
I have another pipeline that pulls down all the groceries from stores every week in a 3km-radius and then builds cheap, healthy recipes from them, then orders the things I need by how the stores are laid out.
In general I spend about 65% of what I used to, so I think that the incentives for consumers are there.
The pressure to turn on the money faucet is very real, and as soon as they do, the AI shopping experiences are going to just mean “run an auction and steer the user to the highest bidder”. Like how Amazon, google, etc all have been doing it for ages. It’s way too profitable for them to ignore.
Maybe this’ll be the first tech product category that avoids enshittification, but I’m not holding my breath.
For instance: I have a small, old cast iron pan that I use to cook eggs. I wanted to buy a very small spatula (or turner, depending on vernacular) to use with it. But the harder I worked to integrate the concept of "small" into the search box, the bigger the spatulas were in the Amazon search results.
It was like being in opposite-land. I ultimately gave up and bought nothing.
But sure: It's absolutely possible that the fashion-oriented utility of a connected LLM will degraded from wherever it is today, and become every bit as terrible as the Amazon search box has always been.
I hope that it doesn't happen, but it certainly can happen.
Really? I must be hallucinating the multiple people I know who do this here in Portugal. Clothes, random parts for stuff they need. They just point a camera and ask for it, often iterating. They clearly prefer the chat interface that somewhat also limits their choice, instead of the plethora of ad-filled websites that are hard to navigate. I'm aware this poses several problems we will need to solve, but it's still happening.
Related: Bar some of my somewhat AI-resistant friends and some older relatives, almost everyone I know (including college students I teach to, my dad, friends, non-tech co-workers...) no longer uses google as their first choice (they do fallback to it if they need to). They all use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Used to be just ChatGPT but now there's a relatively equal divide. And an ever-increasing number of them are clearly using AI for pretty much everything else (proof-reading, writing e-mails, building spreadsheets, tiny custom apps for themselves, creating music, images, jokes, memes, photo editing/touch-ups, student evaluation, school material preparation/creation, personal/intimate advice, and much, much more.)
It is especially fascinating to note that, with the exception of AI-assisted coding, there is clearly more AI usage among the non-tech folks, as so many tech people are immensely resistant to using AI for something other than work. It's clearly shifting, though, as I see more and more of those AI-resistant people slowly also using it in their daily lives, as opposed to "only for work".
Thanks to AI I did not have to parse through a lot of different vendors and different webpages manually.
Call me crazy but I don't think that "discovering how much oranges cost" is a big enough pain point for most people to spend hundreds of dollars on smart glasses to solve.
I know this game is 13 years old but had non-gamer friends who are into fashion get addicted to the Covet Fashion game.
Personally I want to use AI for fashion shopping, it just currently sucks. I want to be able to search for very specific things. Example: "women's button down collared shirt with thin vertical red and white stripes and a floral inside collar lining"
gets me a few close results but also gets thick lines, wrong colors, and not a single one actually matched the description.
303 results including https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
Modern day's "think different".
Your ingroup is other people's outgroup, come join us, we are cool and different.
so out of touch lol. Had an ex-partner (complete non-computer person, working in branding & communications) who was doing that three years ago.
First words "Now Supercharged by M5, [LEARN MORE?]"
*M5* AI in the fast lane. MacBook Air delivers blazing‑fast AI performance thanks to the powerful combination of the GPU, Neural Engine, and unified memory in M5. With a Neural Accelerator built into each GPU core, AI tasks run with amazing efficiency. From AI image upscaling to running the latest large language models, you’ll be more productive and creative than ever.
It's crazy how confident that sounded. I'd bet that energy would have been better spent on asking people instead of assuming that a subjective opinion is representative for anything.
This has btw. nothing to do wheter or not AI does actually have positive impact on society or not - it is the feelings that matter, not objective facts.
I can only imagine the fashion horrors created by AI sycophancy. That said, most "fashion" is already a horror show.
Always has been. What do you think pays for all the “free” stuff on the internet?
"I don't personally know enough people doing what a mega-corporation with a massive market research team with multiple layers of market research audits has concluded people claims to want, so I'm just going to diss the product"
I went to the apple.com homepage, literally zero mentions of Apple Intelligence, just a dropdown option under iPhone's menu items.
My wife in fact just presented me with a spreadsheet generated by Claude of the jewelry she’d like to have.
So yes. I expect a lot of people will use ai to shop.
It is not "shopping for clothes with AI". It is recreating the dressing room experience from home, and it likely will be a table stakes for online shopping in the near future.
This is probably because they know it is not very good.
In fact, if HN hates it, there is a higher chance the product will be successful
Will Bookmark it so that it becomes one of those legendary HN quotes
Unless these things are much cheaper than a Macbook Neo, I don't see it succeeding.
Lol. You're really out of touch, aren't you.
That being said, I don't know if people shop with AI would need a laptop for this... what they showed in the ad looks perfectly doable on an iPad. Perhaps this is Google's iPad attempt?
I was even at a shoe store the other day and just took a pic of a whole shelf full of sneakers and asked claude to explain them for my use case (running vs tennis).
It combines research with a buying decision, which most eCommerce sites don't currently do (except for just listing hundreds of reviews)
A big part of Stadia failing was it didn't get traction, and a big part of that reason was Google's history of just giving up on products out of nowhere, so very few people were willing to give Stadia money with the risk of everything they bought vanishing. Then, when Google did give up on Stadia out of nowhere, Google said they'd refund everyone everything they spent - the kind of pledge that might have encouraged more people to actually give it a try.
Then again I heard anecdotal stories from a lot of developers that Google was a pain in the ass to work with because they didn't understand anything about working with game studios; it was just "we'll give you X money to bring your game to Stadia" when that money didn't make it worth taking developers away from the platforms they were already publishing to.
There are several AI companies now with billions in yearly revenue that didn't even exist a few years ago. Many more with many millions in revenue. Saying AI doesn't sell is completely delusional. You're in an anti-AI bubble.
I suppose you said "AI Company", and not "AI Provider", but AFAIK there are none of the latter that are turning a profit.
Regular people will use AI for everyday things, not writing code and managing Asana boards
Which is weird because Apple Intelligence + Shortcuts is the most underhyped corporate use case for AI. For my money, it’s the quickest and easiest method a non-programmer can use to prompt-build a program that both works and that they can understand.
Yeah anecdotal, but it just doesn't strike me as how people shop.
A bit of a tangent here, but the tldr is that I think this has been the case for quite a while.
I don't have any stats to back this up, and maybe someone does and will prove me wrong, but marketing doesnt feel significantly more effective than it was, say, 50 years ago, and yet the main reason every scrap of data about our personal lives is harvested is supposedly for marketing. Maybe it turns out theres just not that much you can do with the data, I'd certainly hope so, but I think a lot of it is just down to the fact that marketing execs don't actually use the data in any meaningful way, like you say marketing to customers they wish they had to buy the idea they were gonna do either way.
Like I remember a decade or so ago, the promise/warning was that advertising and entertainment would seamlessly blend when it can be tailored to exactly you, to the point where people happily and willingly watch advertisements. We got the opposite, adblockers are extremely common, companies have to strong arm you into even looking at their ads, and people count down the seconds until they can press the skip button
What the hell was that?! Chatgpt didnt do anything. The person that made that ad should be fired for gross incompetence
Litterally hundreds of millions shop with AI today.