In the first responses, ChatGPT did not provide links to products. But it produced them easily when I asked, and although I didn't click on each one, they didn't seem to be hallucinations. Claude, on the other hand, apologized and said that it “can't actually link directly to any websites or products.” Anthropic has not yet released a web search feature for Claude, but the company says it is working on it.
That technically made Claude the least useful chatbot I tested while shopping. But it also means that Anthropic has so far avoided entering ethically murky territory by allowing its AI chatbots to scrap human-written product reviews from the internet. 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 scroll through countless product reviews.”
When I asked Perplexity what to buy for my editor/musician friend, he recommended a solar-powered bicycle light kit (I also noted that he was a cyclist). It wasn't a bad idea, but not exactly a worthy birthday present. I kept adjusting my prompt. How about a personalized leather guitar strap? Down the rabbit hole I went.
Perplexity's purpose in upgrading its store features, I came to understand, wasn't just to help me brainstorm new ideas or come up with extremely thoughtful gifts. Baffling is playing the long game, slowly diverting our attention from competing corners of the internet, gaining a better understanding of how people like me use the platform, and feeding that data into the ever-evolving AI models. Whenever I had to refine my searches because the first results were often lacking, I stayed in Perplexity's app, which meant I was not on Amazon and not on Google (although I ended up on both sites). Perplexity Pro is not yet a full-fledged e-commerce site, nor is it truly “agentic,” but I am one of the millions of people providing the information needed to become those things.
When I consulted Google's Gemini, I discovered 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 to “buy her a cat blanket to snuggle up in 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 she would text me if I sent her the SAT prep book Gemini suggested (probably “thanks,” and nothing else). The app ideas for my editor/musician friend were equally uninspiring, 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 developers and limited testers. The new AI model will “think several steps ahead and take action on your behalf,” the company says. For now, this means taking action on behalf of developers – by executing the next step in their coding workflows – but I'm eagerly awaiting the day when it can plow through my shopping list.
ChatGPT eventually led me to an online spice store where I bought some specialty baking ingredients for my friend, who at the time I had in mind would be a finalist in The great British bake-off. I ended up talking to the AI bots for so long that many of the gifts I chose didn't arrive until after Christmas. My niece gets cash on a card. My search for a friend's milestone birthday gift was inconclusive. I decided to postpone the task until January, a month full of novelty and determination.
