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Phoebe Gates wants her $185 million AI startup to succeed with 'no ties to my privilege or my last name': 'I have a chip on my shoulder' | Fortune (fortune.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Aequitas@feddit.org to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 31 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

The shopping assistant plugs into browsers like Chrome and Safari to compare prices and surface deals across tens of thousands of retail and resale sites in real time. It essentially serves as your own personal deal finder: Say you’re looking at a $200 dress from Anthropologie, Phia can find and compare prices at secondhand sellers to help customers find a better price.

Gates and Kianni first brainstormed startup ideas in their Stanford dorm room, cycling through concepts before landing on a consumer tool that included Gates’ interest in women’s empowerment (likely modeled after her own mother) and Kianni’s sustainability focus.

I don’t think a coupon tool that wastes excessive resources is either empowering or sustainable.

[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

I'd be concerned about monied motives driving suggestions. Even if it starts out neutral, how can we as consumers be sure it won't become corrupted? Enshittification is par for the course these days, I'd be extremely wary about relying on an app to tell me real, unbiased price info unless its mechanisms and sources are (and remain) completely transparent.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 19 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I'd be surprised if there's actual AI behind it. That functionality already exists and works just fine.

[–] SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 15 points 19 hours ago

it's a small indian man named Al.

[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 6 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I’d be surprised if a human were behind it. This is exactly the kind of thing that can be vibe coded pretty fast and is mostly just reselling fancy Google searches through an LLM. I did a quick skim of the website and it’s just a bunch of items scraped from big brands with lots of similar looking images of other products. There’s too many sites for me to really believe they’ve made integrations with all of them.

The insane valuation is because of her name not because the tech is good. The only way to make money on this is the customer data. The margin on that is going to be fucking minuscule especially once LLM costs start going up so they can make money. This adds nothing of value on top so it will go away almost immediately.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 1 points 1 hour ago

Oh, I didn't say a human, I just meant a standard non-AI algorithm