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> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate pric

> I wanted to make something that didn't feel like just my logo on a shirt, so I had one of my bots reach out to ~40 fabric suppliers in vietnam, negotiate prices, lock one in, and get samples made. Isn't this one of the problems foreseen with this? For you, it was a single prompt - for 40 companies, this probably took up some time. What happens when fifty people fire off a 15-second "get me a shirt" prompt? When five hundred, five thousand, five million do?

jjcm 2mo ago
A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that. One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.
- pavel_lishin 2mo ago
  I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
  - jbs789 2mo ago
    And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
    - XCSme 2mo ago
      Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
      - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
        Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
      - toofy 2mo ago
        it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
      - human305893 2mo ago
        For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
  - reaperducer 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  - solid_fuel 2mo ago
    Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying. The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.
    - GPerson 2mo ago
      That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so. *Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.
    - r3trohack3r 2mo ago
      > The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise
      - rootusrootus 2mo ago
        And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
        inigyou 2mo ago
        They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
      - sebastiennight 2mo ago
        IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens. If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.
  - svachalek 2mo ago
    I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
- nvme0n1p1 2mo ago
  If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.
raincole 2mo ago
Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.
- slg 2mo ago
  Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
    - Taek 2mo ago
      I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
      - dgellow 2mo ago
        I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
        brookst 2mo ago
        Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Let me know, I personally don’t see meaningful comparisons to make between the 2
aaron695 2mo ago
[dead]
dylan604 2mo ago
This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.
- pavel_lishin 2mo ago
  > You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.
  - b473a 2mo ago
    The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
    - Gormo 2mo ago
      > The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware. Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.
jryle70 2mo ago
Have you ever been in sales? If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars). If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that. The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious. Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.
- phatfish 2mo ago
  The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say. A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed. Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.
  - b473a 2mo ago
    Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents. On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.
oefrha 2mo ago
It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.
duxup 2mo ago
I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible. The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.
Bombthecat 2mo ago
You need bots on th other side too. Simple
627467 2mo ago
What's the difference between this and how its been done till now? When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth. If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders
Oras 2mo ago
There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters. Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.
zazuke 2mo ago
I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.

jjcm 2mo ago

A reasonable pushback. It originally only reached out to 5, didnt hear back, so reached out to 5 more. I personally pushed it to reach out to an additional 30 after that. One of the difficulties of sourcing this is a lot of the suppliers in vietnam are only contactable via whatsapp. Emails are monitored far less. It's one of the reasons I haven't been successful with this in the past despite trying - it's a very word-of-mouth network.

pavel_lishin 2mo ago
I don't think your reply addresses the point of my comment at all, which is that people receiving messages from AI agents isn't scalable in the same way that people sending messages from AI agents is.
- jbs789 2mo ago
  And more generally, very often the recipient of an email bears more cost than the sender. I heard this once and keep it in mind for every email I send. How do I reduce the cost of replying. Many times it means getting on the phone/ not sending the email at all.
  - XCSme 2mo ago
    Isn't a phone call like 10x more taxing than an email reply?
    - pavel_lishin 2mo ago
      Very likely varies person by person, and topic by topic. I don't like speaking on the phone, but there are some things where a single 3 minute phone call is much simpler and easier than a seven email reply chain spanning four days.
    - toofy 2mo ago
      it entirely depends on the topic. an example is realizing the queries will end up with multiple back and forths. for a lot of things a phone call can solve something in minutes and it’s cleared from your brain queue. while some emails end up with back and forth waiting for each others responses. that’s can be hours or days where it sits in your brain as yet another task to manage. wasteful for something that could have easily been tied up with a quick phone call.
    - human305893 2mo ago
      For every meeting that could have been an email. There are 30 back and forth emails that could have been a 5 min phone call.
- reaperducer 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- solid_fuel 2mo ago
  Funnily this whole example illustrates what everyone on the outside of the LLM psychosis train is saying. The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task they could have done themselves anyway. The only cost was wasting the time of at least 39 other people. It’s gross.
  - GPerson 2mo ago
    That’s how I feel about AI people taking over the arts and fields like mathematics. For most of them it’s just a neat trick, and maybe there’s some business in there (the OpenAI tik tok clone as an extreme example), but for a huge portion of the world AI doing this work represents the end* of one of the best parts of life. I can’t help but view the AI researchers and promoters as callously stomping all over human culture and patting themselves on the back (also stuffing their pockets with the loot) for doing so. *Or at least a serious philosophical adjustment, and not all artists want to draw without even being seen.. Not all mathematicians are playing some abstractly analogous version of chess. Not every way of human existence that has been forgotten is 100% regressive and bad.
  - r3trohack3r 2mo ago
    > The user without empathy has managed to save 30 minutes on a task One supplier ended up with a direct sale they wouldn’t have otherwise
    - rootusrootus 2mo ago
      And if all of their customers start doing this, then they're going to need to jack up prices to cover all of their costs dealing with the deluge.
      - inigyou 2mo ago
        They'll probably just generate the quotes with AI, which is fair.
    - sebastiennight 2mo ago
      IIUC, so far the supplier has only ended up needing to send samples and a quote to a prospect, and no sale has actually happened. So as of today, everyone is showing a net negative result except whichever company sells the Grok bot tokens. If that company is subsidizing the price of the bot with VC money and not turning a profit, then as of today, 40 suppliers, 1 HN member, all Grok/SpaceX investors, all Nasdaq index investors, and probably some others, are showing a net negative, and the only company showing a positive result from all this is NVidia.
- svachalek 2mo ago
  I think in the abstract there's a lot to be concerned about with that. However, I don't see it in this particular case. It's a real customer with a real order and real money, going through proper business channels to place an order. The only thing that was possibly automation overboard here was reaching out to so many suppliers when the original ones didn't respond -- there's a question of how long they waited and how long is considered reasonable turnaround for this kind of supplier. But this is just buying a thing that vendors are selling, in the way they expect to sell it, and in the end resulted in a closed deal.
nvme0n1p1 2mo ago
If I got a mountain of AI slop in my inbox I wouldn't reply either. I bet the reason it works by word-of-mouth is to prevent exactly what you're doing.

raincole 2mo ago

Isn't the answer obvious? The 40 companies will have to use AI to filter the messages too. If your business is selling tokens, it'd be extremely lucrative for you if the whole society relies on tokens to perform basic operations. That's where we're heading to.

slg 2mo ago
Everything is becoming wildly inefficient, all in the name of improved efficiency.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  And everybody in the chain can even justify their improved efficiency! It‘s capitalism endgoal. A massive Goldberg machine, where each piece can be optimized, but overall does produce close to no value compared to its cost and effort
  - Taek 2mo ago
    I have a hard time looking at the world around me and thinking "close to no value"
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      I’m talking specifically about the AI industry
      - brookst 2mo ago
        Well, how does it compare to the internet industry?
        dgellow 2mo ago
        Let me know, I personally don’t see meaningful comparisons to make between the 2

aaron695 2mo ago

[dead]

dylan604 2mo ago

This is what happens when you place a "contact us for a quote" form on your website. You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where. Do you have any experience with a company that receives RFQs to land business? You will spend a lot of time answering all of the questions and digging around to ensure you can actually do what is requested spending days/weeks on it. Only for the work to go somewhere else. In fact, a lot of places require multiple quotes for work, so when they have someone they know they want to work with, they still have to have other companies spin their wheels. They have no qualms about it knowing they are wasting the other companies' time. It's pretty much how things are done.

pavel_lishin 2mo ago
> You will get a high percentage of requests that lead no where Yes, but as per my last email, previously those were limited by the human scale of those requests.
- b473a 2mo ago
  The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. On the other hand, op said he had wanted to do this for years but never had the time / ability. We can probably assume any increase in unserious requests will come with an increase in serious requests from people paying for the tokens to get the quotes.
  - Gormo 2mo ago
    > The fact that tokens aren't free will limit the number of unserious requests. Email is free, and so there's a lot of spam emails sitting in my inbox, but tokens aren't. Back when email was new, using it required paying an hourly fee to a proprietary online service. Then, with economies of scale and protocol standardization, it got to the point where the resources needed for email were so minimal that unlimited usage could be baked into flat-rate service offerings, and anyone who cared to could run their own SMTP/POP/IMAP servers on commodity hardware. Using cloud-hosted LLMs is currently still in the "$5/hour CompuServe account" territory, but imagine what things might look like in five years.

jryle70 2mo ago

Have you ever been in sales? If the requests are real there would never be 5 thousands, let alone 5 millions (or the vendor would count their lucky stars). If they are spams that already happens today as well, at scale. AI bot would not change that. The vendor will never blindly make a sample just based on a single request. There will be back and forth. Maybe require proof that the inquirer is serious. Sending out RFP to 40 vendors isn't unusual.

phatfish 2mo ago
The AI bot does change it, random spam emails get ignored already as you say. A request from an AI agent doesn't, as the parent showed. Now anyone can source 40 samples from Vietnamese factories and get a response, the sort of request that would only come from a serious buyer before AI agents impersonating humans were a thing.
- b473a 2mo ago
  Tokens aren't free so there's already some level of buy-in on the part of the human sending out the agent. The amount of unserious requests will be limited by the cost of the tokens to run the agents. On the other hand op said they'd been wanting to do this for years but never had the time / ability. This is work that would otherwise not be happening.

oefrha 2mo ago

It’s really sad. I suppose for companies doing business online it’s just a (ballooning) cost of doing business, but for personal interactions it’s a disaster. I used to respond pretty enthusiastically to CTOs/team leads/recruiters reaching out who actually talk about details of my open source work as opposed to just sending a canned recruitment email. Nowadays I can’t be sure they’re not just using a bot to gather personalized details. Well, at least the last CTO reaching out to me said they found my profile while trawling with Claude, after I responded; appreciate the honesty I guess.

duxup 2mo ago

I haven't encountered bots but I've had several clients now send excel spreadsheets with requirements with just endless laundry lists of duplicate and semi duplicate and conflicting requirements. I strongly suspect they were the result of AI. These client's paid for the meeting digging through the mess so no loss but man ... it was horrible. The primary person responsible couldn't explain much at all but man they were proud they came up with some brutal spreadsheets.

Bombthecat 2mo ago

You need bots on th other side too. Simple

627467 2mo ago

What's the difference between this and how its been done till now? When sourcing you'd typical prepare a same request and email the supliers similarly looking emails and they - if interest on business - would respond and start a back and forth. If anything now there will be more business. Filtering and triaging was always an issue you'd have to deal with and if the cost of dealing with small order is too high you just stop taking those and filter out large orders

Oras 2mo ago

There will be reservation fees to start the process that only charges when there is no-show or time wasters. Restaurants in London started charging when there is no show for reservations.

zazuke 2mo ago

I think that happens already with email. I get a ton of same emails "want to join my podcast" or "see my product" based on some github projects I did or so, clearly all ai written. Important to have a good screener in your email.