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In its initial responses, ChatGPT did not provide any links to products. But he readily provided them to me when I asked, and although I didn’t click on every single one of them, none of them seemed to be hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said that “you can’t actually link directly to websites or products.” Anthropic has not yet launched a web search feature for Claude, but the company says it is working on it.
That technically made Claude the least useful chatbot I tried to buy. But it also means that Anthropic has so far avoided wading into the ethically murky territory of allowing its AI chatbots to scrub human-written product reviews from the web. Instead, Claude bases his product comparisons on his existing data set. Perplexity, on the other hand, says that thanks to Buy with Pro, people “no longer have to sift through countless product reviews.”
When I asked Perplexity what I should get my editor/musician friend, they recommended a set of solar bike lights (I also noticed he was a cyclist). It wasn’t a bad idea, but it wasn’t exactly a gift worthy of a milestone birthday. I kept modifying my message. How about a custom leather guitar strap? I went down the rabbit hole.
I was beginning to understand that Perplexity’s goal in promoting its shopping features wasn’t just to help me generate new ideas or offer extremely thoughtful gifts. Perplexity is playing the long game, slowly diverting our attention from the competitive corners of the web, gaining a better understanding of how people like me use its platform, and funneling that data into its ever-evolving AI models. Whenever I needed to refine my searches because the initial results were often missing, I stayed on the Perplexity app, which meant I wasn’t on Amazon or Google (although I eventually ended up on both sites). Perplexity Pro is not a full ecommerce site, nor is it an “agent” in any real way yet, but I am one of the millions of people providing the information you need to become those things.
When I turned to Google’s Gemini, I found that the gifts it suggested for my 16-year-old niece weren’t bad, per se, just uncreative and, in one case, confusing. It said I should buy her a “cat blanket to curl up with a good book,” but it wasn’t clear if the blanket was for her or her cat. A Kindle was a good idea. But I’m terrified of what he’d send me if I sent him the SAT prep book Gemini suggested (probably “thank you” and nothing more). The app ideas for my editor and musician friend were equally boring, including “Vinyl Records” and “High Quality Headphones.”
I was using the year-old version of Gemini, but earlier this month, Google started rolling out a newer version, Gemini 2.0, to limited developers and testers. The new AI model “will think several steps ahead and take action on your behalf,” the company said. says. For now, this means taking action on behalf of developers (executing the next step in their coding workflows), but I’m eagerly awaiting the day when I can review my shopping list.
ChatGPT finally took me to an online spice store where I bought some special baking ingredients for my friend, who at the time had his eye on being a finalist in The Great British Bake Off. In the end, I chatted with the AI bots for so long that many of the gifts I picked out won’t arrive until after Christmas. My niece will receive cash on a card. My search for a friend’s important birthday gift was inconclusive. I decided to postpone the task until January, a month full of news and agency resolution.
