This is a little bit of an off-topic story, but still somewhat relevant. I was shopping on Amazon for LED light strips recently. I noticed that some of them s

This is a little bit of an off-topic story, but still somewhat relevant. I was shopping on Amazon for LED light strips recently. I noticed that some of them said "no-waterproof" in the description, which I thought was weird. Like if they're not waterproof, just don't say anything. I searched for "waterproof", and of course they show up in the top results. Everyone looking for waterproof LED light strips will find these instead of ones that are actually waterproof. The search is just a dumb word search. (I have no idea if people want or buy waterproof LED light strips, or even if such a thing actually exists. Mine are going in a 3D printer which is ostensibly not damp.) So, I opened up the OpenAI playground to see if GPT-3 could do better. I prompted: "Q: Is a product called "KXZM 24V LED Strip Light Natural White 600LEDs, 16.4ft Flexible SMD2835 High Brightness 4000-4500K No-Waterproof IP33 LED Tape Lights" waterproof? A:" and it answered "It's not. As you can see, this product is not waterproof. It says so in the product description." (GPT-3 is always a bit mean to me, but in this case, I obviously deserved it. What else could "no-waterproof" mean, ya idiot ;) My conclusion is that GPT-3 could easily filter out products that don't actually match a search query, and prevent disreputable sellers from abusing naive keyword matching, making the shopping experience better for everyone. And, Amazon obviously has the talent and compute resources to build their own model like GPT-3. But they don't do it! They don't care if you buy the wrong thing or that the search results are irrelevant. As long as you click something and buy it, they make money. I don't know how this works out long term, but I'm guessing that people don't notice they're not waterproof, and Chinese Factory A that did keyword optimization makes more money than Chinese Factory B that sprayed the LEDs with a conformal coating. (If the return rate gets too high, you just pick 8 more random all-caps letters and start a new company.) Simple use of an API could solve this problem in seconds. Customers would be happier. We wouldn't be rewarding manipulation. It's easy. And yet, they don't. They just "select * from products where keywords like '%$1'". My conclusion is that Amazon simply doesn't care. They're #1, and you can't get better than #1, right? If they kill a few people in a pandemic with counterfeit masks, who cares? #2 DREAMS they were killing people in a pandemic!