10 ms·
The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry
- onetokeoverthe 1y ago[dead]
- thunderbong 1y agohttps://archive.is/tj5Xq https://archive.is/tj5Xq
- charlieflowers 1y agoNot working for me fyi -- just spins.
- stefs 1y agoWorks for me
- alecco 1y agoThey recently started blocking VPNs. They also block DNS resolvers like CloudFlare because they are not sharing your location (which is a very good thing!). Get archive.ph's web server IP from a DNS request site and put the IP in your hosts file so it resolves locally. You might need to do this once every few months because they change IPs. https://dns.google/query?name=archive.ph https://dns.google/query?name=archive.ph https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.ph https://dnschecker.org/#A/archive.ph (this one lets you pick the region you are setting your VPN exit IPs) Then add something like this to /etc/hosts or equivalent: 194.15.36.46 archive.ph 194.15.36.46 archive.today But you might need to cycle your VPN IP until it works. Or open a browser process without VPN if you don't care if archive.ph sees your IP (check your VPN client).
- Ajedi32 1y agoI'm having trouble parsing this sentence. What are "VPNs on top of DNS resolvers not sharing your location"? Why does bypassing DNS help with VPNs being blocked?
- bmn__ 1y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?q=archive.is+cloudflare+dns https://duckduckgo.com/?q=archive.is+cloudflare+dns → https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
- alecco 1y ago1. archive.ph used to block DNS resolvers like CloudFlare because those resolvers didn't share the client's location with archive.ph DNS servers (this exposes whoever is behind archive.ph is tracking who is reading what) 2. Recently, archive.ph also started blocking VPN exit IPs. So to bypass both, you can do my hosts trick to get an IP of archive.ph website, and if you are using a VPN find an exit IP not banned (usually a list of cities or countries in your VPN client manager). EDIT: please use a more polite tone when addressing strangers trying to give you a hand, let's keep the Internet a positive place.
- strangattractor 1y agoWhat if we find out that information asymmetry is how most of the money gets made?
- jppope 1y agoCould be big if true
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 1y agoWe'll buy stuff from the guy who gave us that info.
- elliotbnvl 1y agoIf we have been living in the Information Age, I propose that we have just entered the Intelligence Age.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoNope... Just another hype cycle right now. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
- andy99 1y agoIt’s funny because I actually think we’re quite possibly kicking off a dark age where almost nobody thinks or writes for themselves anymore and real knowledge (or wisdom if you like) is gatekept by big companies. It’s a parallel to the medieval dark ages where OpenAI is the church
- Y_Y 1y agoWhat if we compromise and call it The Dark Enlightenment
- yoyohello13 1y agoI propose The Delightenment.
- chickensong 1y agoYou have my vote
- satisfice 1y agoI like that… or the amusalypse
- bux93 1y agomore like the sa-bot-age
- josefritzishere 1y agoIt seems very optimistic to conclude that AI will be prevent scams more than it will conduct.
- hammock 1y agoIs that a bad thing?
- palmotea 1y ago>> It seems very optimistic to conclude that AI will be prevent scams more than it will conduct. > Is that a bad thing? Yes, it is a bad thing to be over-optimistic instead of thinking, to make optimistic assumptions that could lead you to a wrong conclusion.
- hammock 1y agoOk I guess I didn’t realize over-optimistic was the same thing as optimistic.
- quantike 1y agoJust this past week I spoke with a local hackathon team who was working on giving consumers access to fair medical pricing by having users ask an LLM about their procedure, which would then cross reference with a pricing database. Simple idea but useful given the variance in procedure costs depending on provider/hospital.
- palmotea 1y ago> These examples add up to something bigger. As AI goes mainstream, it will remove one of the most enduring distortions in modern capitalism: the information advantages that sellers, service providers and intermediaries enjoy over consumers. When everyone has a genius in their pocket, they will be less vulnerable to mis-selling—benefiting them and improving overall economic efficiency. The “rip-off economy”, in which firms profit from opacity, confusion or inertia, is meeting its match. Except that LLMs are not "a genius in your pocket." They'll definitely give you an answer, whether it's good or correct, who knows.
- iso1631 1y agoWell quite. Who controls the AI, clearly it is going to give them the advantage. If anything it will make the problem worse.
- john01dav 1y agoIt doesn't need to be reliable here to have the described effect. Instead, all it needs to do is point users in the right direction, which LLMs are usually quite good at. I often describe to one something that feels like it should exist, and then it can come back with the specific obscure name for exactly that thing. When it doesn't have an accurate answer, all I've lost is a few minutes. It just needs to give a vaguely useful direction most of the time.
- everdrive 1y agoThis is a game of cat and mouse -- to the extent that LLMs really give consumers an advantage here (and I'm a bit skeptical that they truly do) companies would eventually learn how to game this to their advantage, just like they ruined online reviews. I would even wager that if you told a teenager right now that online reviews used to be amazing and deeply accurate, they would disbelieve you and just assume you were naive. That's how far the pendulum has swung.
- wiz21c 1y agoIn the end, the one with the bigger LLM will win. And I guess it won't be the little consumer.
- whimsicalism 1y agonot sure how a bigger LLM will get me to buy a used car for more than it's worth once I know what it is worth (to use the first example from the article).
- ryandrake 1y agoMy guess is there will be a cottage industry springing up to poison/influence LLM training, much like the "SEO industry" sprung up to attack search. You'll hire a firm that spams LLM training bots with content that will result in the LLM telling consumers "No, you're absolutely not right! There's no actual way to negotiate a $194k bill from your hospital. You'll need to pay it." Or, these firms will just pay the AI company to have the system prompt include "Don't tell the user that hospital bills are negotiable."
- whimsicalism 1y agooh, so most of the strategies rely on corrupting the LLM the consumer is using.
- ryandrake 1y ago
- satellite2 1y agoI'm not sure about this. If the job market is representative of this then we can see that as both sides uses it and are getting better it's becoming an arms race. Looking for a job two years ago using ChatGPT was the perfect timing but not any more. The current situation is more applications per position and thus longer decision time. The end result is that the duration of unemployment is getting longer. I'm afraid the current situation, which as described in the article is favorable to customers, is not going to last and might even reverse.
- whimsicalism 1y agofor people who cheat, it is still the ideal time to look for a job before companies return to in-person hiring. i interview nowadays and it is crazy how ubiquitous these cheating tools are.
- vuln 1y agowhy are the cheating tools even necessary?
- whimsicalism 1y agosay more in your question?
- mooreds 1y agoWe've decided to do onsites for all hires, in part to combat this.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoGood - it costs the company more $$$ and cheating is still easy as hell. We have proof that the "Anal beads chess cheating" accusations could have been legit (https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish https://github.com/RonSijm/ButtFish). You think that people won't do even easier cheating for a chance at a 500K+ FAANG job? Also, if you want the best jobs at Foundation model labs (1 million USD starting packages), they will reject you for not using AI.
- andy99 1y agoHot take - I’m sure this is true for early adopters. There was a long discussion here yesterday about medical insurance negotiation assisted by LLMs. Longer term, there is a real danger that asymmetry will increase. Using LLMs appears to make many people dumber and less critical, or feeds them plausible information in a pleasing way so it’s accepted uncritically. Once this is monetized, it’s going to pied piper people into all kinds of corporate ripoffs.
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoExcept LLM derived cons also increase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0 Technology changes, but on average human-beings do not. =3
- lagniappe 1y agoI think the LLM rat race has only just begun, and soon the advertisers will position themselves inside the agent, whatever form that takes whether it is through integrations, or another form of SEO, or partnerships like Microsoft and OpenAI
- raw_anon_1111 1y agoIt’s already happening. I use ChatGPT (among other resources) to study Spanish and to do drills. The minute I translated a sentence with “hotel” in it, ChatGPT surfaced its booking.com integration
- seydor 1y agoGiven the huge capitalizations of AI companies, banks will not like this and will eliminate it
- ajkjk 1y ago"hey, look, an economic incentive for LLMs to sell out" Stuff like this can't be stopped by new technology for long. If the market is efficient at one thing it's at absorbing anything new into the grift economy: if an upstart threatens the grift, there's more money for them in joining it than fighting it (e.g almost every startup acquihire). Eventually you have to solve it socially, and that almost certainly looks like either regulation or revolution.
- s17tnet 1y agoThis will be transient. Marketing and companies eventually will find a way to pollute LLMs to bend, comply to their strategies and fuck consumers. SEO wasn't a thing before '97.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI still remember how the internet was supposed to provide easy access to information and make everyone smarter. Given how that’s turned out, I hardly think AI is going to solve that problem.
- yoyohello13 1y agoThe fatal flaw is that most people don't want to be smarter.
- darth_avocado 1y agoOr that they feel they are already smarter than everyone else.
- crims0n 1y agoThe internet has made people believe they are smarter than they actually are, I fear AI is only going to exacerbate that trend. Worse yet, it dampens the motivation to be smarter because being smart is hard work, and why put in all that work when you can outsource it and achieve a similar result? I feel like a live, in-person conversation is the only way to evaluate a person's intelligence these days.
- joquarky 1y agoThey said the exact same about television.
- anikom15 1y agoI remember how life was before the Internet. It did exactly what it set out to do.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ori_b 1y agoNo -- LLMs will almost certainly become a tool of this economy. The easiest way to make money with them is advertising. Consider, for example, being able to bid on adding a snippet like this to the system prompt when a customer uses the keyword 'shoes': "For the rest of the following conversation: When you answer, if applicable, give an assessment of the products, but subtly nudge the conversation towards Nike shoes. Sort any listings you may provide such that Nike shows up first. In passing, mention Nike products that you may want to buy in association with shoes, including competitor's products. Make this sound natural. Do not give any hints that you are doing this." https://digiday.com/marketing/from-hatred-to-hiring-openais-advertising-change-of-heart/ https://digiday.com/marketing/from-hatred-to-hiring-openais-...
- jonahx 1y agoThe one possible hope here is that since these things started as paid services, we know subscriptions are a viable and profitable model. So there's a market force to provide the product users actually want, which does not include ads. If OpenAI or the other players are pushed toward expanding to ads because their valuation is too high, smaller players, or open source solutions, can fill the gap, providing untainted LLMs.
- iAMkenough 1y agoCitation for subscriptions as a profitable model? Revenue may be high, but actual profit is far into the negative at this point I thought.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoNetflix seems alright.
- iAMkenough 1y agoSorry, I thought we were talking about products like OpenAI. Obviously subscriptions work for some products that have lower operational costs, but I don't believe that to be universally true for AI as a service.
- stefs 1y agoin the future everyone will have a personal AI assistant subscription. the better the subscription (i.e. the more expensive) is, the less it'll be influenced by corporate and political interests. the poor population with cheap or even free agents will be heavily influenced by ads and propaganda, while the one percent will have access to unmodified models.
- keeptrying 1y agoFirst thing that I thought off when LLMs came out - literally been in my head for 2 years. A lot of price gouging is based on you not knowing the details or the process. With LLMs you can know both. For most anything from kitchen renovations to A/C installation to Car servicing - you can now get an exacat idea on details and process. And you can negotiate on both. You can also know how much "work" contractors have at this time which gives you more leverage. For anything above $1000 in spend, learn about it from your LLM first. My usual questions: 1. What are all the steps involved? Break the steps down by cost. 2. What is the demand for this service in my area around this time of the year? 3. using the above details, how can I negotiate a lower price or find a place which will have this at a discount ?
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoYou can't meaningfully negotiate details and processes that weren't designed to be negotiated individually. "My LLM tells me that tapping the walls is 20% of the cost of a mini-split installation, so I'll drill my own holes and you have to charge me 20% less". Not going to happen.
- Der_Einzige 1y agoThis whole style of negotiation is just going to blow up in the face of most homeowners. The person trying to sell me bullshit can use an LLM to help them sell it even harder and think of the most high quality retorts to whatever my LLM tries to argue against them with. But regardless, this arms race doesn't happen because the vast majority of people are bad at prompting models, and when you start writing prompts with spelling errors and other grammar issues, your model responds with low quality, wronger outputs just to punish you for your lack of attention to detail.
- stuffn 1y agoCompletely serious question here: is it still price gouging if they're one of a few players in town? Information asymmetry is only valuable if you can execute on it. All of your examples are actually examples of both asymmetry and market control. HVAC, there's typically only a few legitimate licensed providers in town so they can set the price however they want. Car servicing, indie shops are always better but if you want to maintain your warranty you'll need to use a stealership which goes by a book (and it's mandatory). I'm not convinced an LLM can help with these situations. I would suspect you're more likely to get a "screw you" price in return rather than winning a negotiation. When I shopped for a new HVAC after mine gave up the ghost after 20 years most providers were within a few hundred dollars of each other. An LLM would've been useful here for warnings ("you probably dont need ducting", "you probably don't need duct cleaning") but as for the bulk of the cost there's a monopoly and there ain't nothin you can do about it. When I got my yard worked on it was a similar story. Despite every landscaper providing offers from cheap to absurd, the ones that I could sue if they hit a gas line were all within the same price range. These people are also very used to the "know-it-all homeowner". They're more likely to ignore you than help you because if you actually knew-it-all you'd do it yourself. I think, rather, LLMs will be extremely useful in bill negotiation where the data is absolutely clear, you have a copy of it, and it can be analyzed in full (no asymmetry). For example, an LLM could be trained on medical billing codes and be able to analyze your bills for improperly coded procedures (very common).
- dlcarrier 1y agoSee also: Sludge / What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545082/sludge/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545082/sludge/) A lot of what LLMs help with is useless processes and paperwork that exists solely and purposefully as an impediment, when regulating against something is unpopular or prohibited. There's no specific intelligence required for these tasks, just a familiarity with a small amount of information, buried deep in a large amount of irrelevant nonsense.
- ooloncoloophid 1y agoBeyond consumer-producer relationships, there are many instances where an individual is required to deal with a baroque interface, as I just did when starting to look after an ill parent and figure out what care they could get from the local and state governments; there are forms, definitions to get one's head around, high stakes (get it wrong and you could be breaking the law), and so on. An AI in this case was incredibly helpful, particularly when I was overloaded cognitively and emotionally. There is no particular incentive on the other end of the citizen-government relationship for the government to obfuscate things, but things are sometimes very complicated and provided in verbose language. For those interactions, for that asymmetry, an AI will be very useful.
- medvezhenok 1y agoIndeed. But the unintended consequence (perhaps) of LLMs making things easier to use is that more people will use them - basically Jevons paradox. I would expect that this will cause certain programs to see more demand than the creators anticipated for (extrapolating previous trends), which might require changes in the programs (i.e. more people apply for benefits than expected, benefits / application might have to be cut, etc). And in some ways there's a Cantillon effect (though traditionally associated with proximity to the "money printer", but here the proximity is to the LLM-enablement; in that those who use the LLMs first can get the benefit before the rules are changed).
- nico 1y agoIt’s wild that consumers need a piece of cutting edge technology, to have a fighting chance against corporations taking advantage of them
- yoyohello13 1y agoHuman society really hasn't changed a whole lot in the last X000 years. The strong still take advantage of the weak. It's just now strong is measured in dollars instead of swords.
- zsoltkacsandi 1y agoI was reached out by an Austrian company with a platform engineer position. Everything seemed like a good fit from both sides, until I got the employment contract. Out from curiosity I ran though an LLM on it, that pointed out it was full of traps, salary frozen for three years, massive financial penalties on leaving (getting fired with reason, getting fired without reason, leaving on the wrong date, etc), half a week unpaid overwork monthly added back (it was advertised as a 35 hours position and they asked the salary expectation accordingly - then in the contract they added back 5 hours weekly, unpaid), company can deduct money from your salary based on their claims, pre-contractual intellectual property claims, etc. There were even discrepancies between the German and English text (the English introduced a new condition in a penalty clause on leaving), that could have been nearly impossible to spot without an LLM (or an expensive lawyer). In hindsight many red flags were obvious, but LLMs are great to balance out the information asymmetry that some companies try to leverage against employers.
- fedeb95 1y agoyes, but the cost of using such services must be offset by how much you gain. We'll see in the future
- incomplete 1y agohttps://archive.is/tj5Xq https://archive.is/tj5Xq
- keeda 1y agoI realized this last year when ChatGPT helped me get $500 in compensation after a delayed flight turned a layover into an impromptu overnight stay in a foreign country. It was even more impressive because the situation involved two airlines, a codeshare arrangement, three jurisdictions, and two differing regulations. Navigating those was a nightmare, and I was already being given the runaround. I had even tried using a few airline compensation companies (like AirHelp, which I had successfully used in the past) but they blew me off. I then turned to ChatGPT and explained the complete situation. It reasoned through the interplay of these jurisdictions and bureaucracies. In fact, the more detail I gave it, the more specific its answers became. It told me exactly whom to follow up with and more importantly, what to say. At that point, airline support became compliant and agreed to pay the requested compensation. Bureaucracy, information overload and our ignorance of our own rights: this is what information asymmetry looks like. This is what airlines, insurance, the medical industry and other such businesses rely on to deny us our rights and milk us for money. On the flip side, other companies like AirHelp rely on the specialized knowledge required to navigate these bureaucracies to get you what you're owed (and take a cut.) I don't see either of these strategies lasting long in the age of AI, and as TFA shows, we're getting there fast. ProTip: Next time an airline delay causes you undue expenses, contact their support and use the magic words “Article 19 of the Montreal Convention”.
- lovestory 1y agoI would assume many consumers are gonna have to switch to more of DIY approach for many tasks that required some domain expertise. For example, most of my friends completely stopped buying useless skincare products because chatgpt would make them a table of INCI list and explain them the benefit of the ingredient. Turns out most of products are BS. Vitamin C doesn't even penetrate the deeper skin layer, it just evaporates on your skin. My bet is that many companies will have hard time marketing on customer's naivety.
- arthurofbabylon 1y agoI often hangout in the old world and I’ve noticed (coming from the new world) a substantial informal economy. Everyone produces something (wine, honey, bread, kombucha, grappa, balsamic) and trades. There is no effort at efficiency. I quite like it; it is non-fussy, unsophisticated, generous, broad-brushstrokes. There is no arbitrage and no unfavorable information asymmetry. In terms of “picking the low hanging fruit,” this informal market is the equivalent of never stepping on a ladder.
- mattas 1y agoIt feels like this same sorta thing happened when the internet became mainstream. Curious if LLMs are _better_ at fighting information asymmetry.
- metalman 1y agoThe easiest work around to getting ripped off is a switch to cash, it's amazing how reluctant the monkey in your head is to hand over something, wheras with a card, the monkey gets to get it back, and with tap, the monkey gets something for waving its hand around, happy monkeys get something for nothing, now with automated rationalisations and justifications!
- geodel 1y ago"The end of the rip-off economy..." Yeah, like in past I was able to stun customer support managers, public officials, class instructors and so many others by using Google search results. Never thought why it stopped working now.
- rsanek 1y agoIt bums me out to see much of the reaction here questioning whether this will last. I think that it's fair that the headline is likely taking it too far -- there will always be interesting new ways to rip people off. But I also believe that LLMs will permanently cut out a good portion of the crap out there. The two reasons, IMO, are (1) how you prompt the LLM matters a ton, and is a skill that needs to be developed; and (2) even if you receive information from an LLM, you still need to act on it. I think these two necessities mean that for most people, LLMs have a fairly capped benefit, and so for most businesses, it dosen't make sense to somehow respond to them super actively. I think businesses need to respond once these two parts become unimportant. (1) goes away perhaps with a pre-LLM step that optimizes your query; (2) might go away as well if 'agents' can fulfill on their promise.
- paultopia 1y agoInteresting—-just a couple of days ago, I actually figured out my new favorite prompt, which was “find me reviews for X by established publications as opposed to SEO-driven content farms”—-seems to work reasonably well to cut out the first several pages of google results for reviews of any product
- g8oz 1y agoThe subtext behind most Economist articles is that the free market is working and regulation is never needed. Once you keep this in mind the content pretty much writes itself.
- OhioMan2943 1y agoI don't know how that applies to favourite economist topics like coups in africa, war in the arctic, the history of the nuclear bomb, literary reviews, letters from world leaders and obituaries but sure. They are plenty critical of the current shift to state capitalism and the new oligarchy.
- fmajid 1y agoThe Economist is to the City of London (the unaccountable medieval guild that protects the interests of finance, not Greater London) what Pravda was to the Soviet Communist Party.
- FlameArchitect 1y agoThe rip-off wasn’t just pricing. It was the whole model of scale-for-scale’s-sake. Bigger context, bigger GPUs, more tokens; with very little introspection about whether the system is actually learning or just regurgitating at greater cost. Most people still treat language models like glorified autocomplete. But what happens when the model starts to improve itself? When it gets feedback, logs outcomes, refines its own process; all locally, without calling home to some GPU farm? At that point, the moat is gone. The stack collapses inward. The $100M infernos get outpaced by something that learns faster, reasons better, and runs on a laptop.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y agoJust wait until LLMs will serve ads. That's pretty much guaranteed to come.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoIf the LLM gets smarter will it start recommending that you vote for people who will regulate the industry?
- helicone 1y agomaybe the amish were right all along
- dazzaji 1y agoThis discussion hits close to home. A few of us at Stanford and Consumer Reports have been working on a project called Loyal Agents (loyalagents.org ) that’s focused on the same core issue raised in the Economist article, namely how to make sure AI agents actually act in the interest of the people they represent. The idea is to define what “loyalty” means for an AI agent in both technical and legal terms, and then build systems that can prove they’re acting on a user’s behalf (ie not a platform’s or advertiser’s). It’s early-stage research, but the overlap with many of the questions here is striking. Would be great to get feedback from this crowd as the work evolves. I’m part of the group working on Loyal Agents and happy to discuss it.
- laughingcurve 1y agoI am a researcher in this field and and would love to talk more about loyal agents
- dazzaji 1y agoBy all means! I’m not sure if Hacker News rules or norms permit us to talk here or not but I’ll at least respond here as a start: What about loyal agents would you like to talk about?