ChatGPT did not provide any product links in their initial responses. But it supplied them easily when I asked, and even though I didn’t click on every one, none seemed like hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized, saying that he “can’t actually directly link to websites or products.” Anthropic hasn’t yet released a web search feature for Claude, but the company says it’s working on it.
This technically made Cloud the least useful chatbot I tested for shopping. But it also means that, for now, Anthropic is avoiding venturing into the ethically murky territory of allowing its AI chatbots to collect human-written product reviews from the web. Instead, Claude bases its product comparisons on its existing dataset. Perplexity, on the other hand, says that with Buy with Pro, people “no longer have to wade through countless product reviews.”
When I asked Perplexity what I should get my editor/musician friend, it recommended a set of solar bike lights (I also noted that he was a cyclist). It wasn’t a bad idea, but it wasn’t exactly a birthday present. I kept tweaking the challenge. How about a personalized 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 come up with new ideas or come up with super thoughtful gifts. Perplexity is playing the long game, slowly siphoning our attention away from competing corners of the web, gaining a better understanding of how people like me use its platform, and feeding that data into its ever-evolving AI models. Every time I needed to refine my searches, because the initial results were often missing, I was left in the Perplexity app, which meant I wasn’t on Amazon or Google (although I ended up on both of those sites). Perplexity Pro is not a full-fledged e-commerce site, nor is it an “agent” in any real sense, but I am one of the millions of people who provide the information it needs to become one.
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 snuggle up with a good book” but it wasn’t clear if the blanket was for her or her cat. The Kindle was a good idea. But I’m terrified of what she’d write me if I sent her the SAT prep book that Gemini suggested (probably “thx” and nothing else). The app ideas for my editor/musician friend were equally uninspiring, with “Vinyl Records” and “High Quality Headphones” among them.
I’ve been using a year-old version of Gemini, but earlier this month Google started offering a newer version, Gemini 2.0, to developers and limited testers. The new AI model “thinks several steps ahead and takes action on your behalf,” the company says. For now, that means taking action on behalf of the developers — taking the next step in their coding workflows — but I’m anxiously awaiting the day it can work its way through my shopping list.
ChatGPT eventually led me to an online spice store where I bought some special baking ingredients for a friend of mine who I figured at this point was going to be a finalist The Great British Bake-Off. I ended up chatting with the AI bots for so long that many of the gifts I picked wouldn’t arrive until after Christmas. My niece gets cash by card. My search for a birthday boyfriend milestone was inconclusive. I decided to kick off the task until January, a month full of news and agent determination.