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These days it seems like everyone has an AI chatbot for you to interact with. Amazon recently released their consumer facing chatbot, Rufus, to help customers find, compare and shop on Amazon. In some quarters, the release of Rufus is being framed as a reaction to the perception that Amazon is playing catchup when it comes to AI, but I donât think a consumer chatbot is going to overcome any of those concerns.Â
Weâve also seen Perplexityâs âAI-poweredâ search engine make a splash, getting a mostly positive response from what Iâve seen on the internet. In my experience it helped answer broad questions, but when I wanted to find a new face wash it wasnât very helpful for browsing my options or shopping around like I normally would on Google. It also comes in the form of a question and answer dialogue, with the option to ask follow-on questions, along with citations for the answers it gives you.
Now that there are chatbots everywhere, what happens next? I think weâll continue to see an influx of customer service oriented chatbots pop up on every product or store website we interact with. This will be the tip of the iceberg as we see a move towards domain specific chatbots that excel within a narrow scope. OpenAI has clearly foreseen this with their GPT store, and Hugging Face just launched their âAssistantsâ catalog where users can create and share custom chatbots. I wouldnât be surprised to see more enterprises and consumer startups successfully focusing on niche offerings.
While other autonomous vehicle companies struggled last year, it turns out Apple has been ramping up its mileage for testing its autonomous vehicles according to filings with the CA DMV. Its mileage is still far less than others like Waymo, but it is interesting to watch as Apple seems to be simultaneously trying to lower expectations for itself in the space (self-driving debut pushed to 2026, and recently to 2028).
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