undefined | Better HN

0 pointsthrowaway133374mo ago0 comments

This is the future we need to make happen.

I would love to subscribe to / pay for service that are just APIs. Then have my agent organize them how I want.

Imagine youtube, gmail, hacker news, chase bank, whatsapp, the electric company all being just apis.

You can interact how you want. The agent can display the content the way you choose.

Incumbent companies will fight tooth and nail to avoid this future. Because it's a future without monopoly power. Users could more easily switch between services.

Tech would be less profitable but more valuable.

It's the future we can choose right now by making products that compete with this mindset.

0 comments

13 comments · 6 top-level

charcircuit4mo ago· 3 in thread

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

SV_BubbleTime4mo ago

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

charcircuit4mo ago

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

socalgal24mo ago

And how would you search this petabytes of data?

stephen_cagle4mo ago· 2 in thread

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

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

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

throwaway13337OP4mo ago

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

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

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

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

Feels like the 90s.

ceramati4mo ago

Love it, we can finally make the libertarian paradise of a patchwork of private roads possible by having your agent negotiate a path to where you want to go and make the appropriate micro payments.

daxfohl4mo ago· 1 in thread

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

verpeteren4mo ago

Interesting

andrekandre4mo ago· 1 in thread

  > Imagine youtube, gmail, hacker news, chase bank, whatsapp, the electric company all being just apis.

too easy to skip/strip the ads that way...

syabro4mo ago

Premium accounts?

root_axis4mo ago

> Because it's a future without monopoly power.

Except for the LLM driving the entire process.

galkk4mo ago

What is in it _for them_?

Where and how do they make money?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse